ANNA KINGSFORD

& EDWARD MAITLAND:

LIVING COURTLY LOVE

PART THREE:

SELECTED KINGSFORD (& MAITLAND)  TEACHINGS

Chapter three has material that explains how Kingsford and Maitland’s revelations were received.  This is something of interest to me since I have read about and written on this topic extensively.  

I explore it in one case using a case history, comparing the revelatory styles of Joseph Smith and Joan of Arc.  Anna (Mary) was convinced that her revelatory style was very similar to that of Joan of Arc, in terms of visions, visitations, lights, voices and intuitions.  I believe her revelatory experiences go way beyond those of Joan of Arc, however, in terms of their constancy and variety and subject matter.  We will return to this topic after having sampled some of their revelatory repertoire.

This third chapter is titled “THE COMMUNICATION” and in this section I will cite the first paragraph of the chapter in its entirety, because it shows that Kingsford and Maitland were conscious of a difference between their experience of revelation and the experience of the prophet Daniel, one of the few Biblical prophets to describe how he felt during a revelation (page 71):

    A STRIKING feature for us was the exquisite tenderness and poetic delicacy, both in matter and manner, which characterised all that we received. Nor was there the intrusion of anything to suggest feelings such as are described by Daniel when he says, “I saw this great vision, and there remained no strength in me, neither was there breath left in me.'' And not only was the element of terror so completely absent as to make us feel as if we had entered on the dispensation of that “perfect love which casteth out fear,” but there was occasionally an element of playfulness, and this on the part of our chiefest illuminators, the Gods themselves. While their instructions were replete with every graceful and delicate adornment such as could not but delight the poet and the artist, and this without abatement of profundity or solemnity. By these things it was intimated to us that the religion of the future was indeed to be one of sweetness and light, and for the severe and gloomy spirit of the Semite would be substituted the bright and joyous spirit of the Greek. All this, we learnt, was because the new dispensation was to be that of the “Woman,” and in accord therefore with woman's nature and sentiments. It was moreover to be introduced by means of the Woman's faculty, the Intuition, and this as subsisting in a woman.

It will become abundantly clear shortly that Kingsford was this very woman bringing the new dispensation into this world in these, its last days.  

On pages 72-73 there is a statement that caused me pause, they are speaking of using intellect but supplementing it with intuition. Interesting to me since I try to keep them away from each other (hence I am not a seer?).  It is also interesting because a certain Buddhist flavoring added in through an allusion to illusion:

    . . . as the angel was to the man, so is the intuition to the intellect, which of itself cannot transcend the sense-nature, but remains blind and dark and lost in the wilderness of illusion. And as she, my colleague, had supplemented me, so were we each to supplement in ourselves intellect by intuition, in order to become capable of knowledge and understanding. . . . .

Pages 73-74 have a minor miracle in them: through a revelation to her they both learn that Spinoza was a maker of eye-glasses.  There is also a revelation from Swedenborg, the mystic.

This is important material.  Important to understanding the theology of Kingsford and Maitland that is, because it underpins statements that come later about how their revelations came.

I was a fan of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, a book he published in 1758 describing his travels into the world beyond this one.  From his visionary travels through heaven he reports on such daring ideas as marriages continuing in heaven and other striking, unusual things.  This is what Wikipedia says about him in its first paragraph:

    Emanuel Swedenborg (born Emanuel Swedberg; February 8, 1688–March 29, 1772) was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, Christian mystic, and theologian. Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. At the age of fifty-six he entered into a spiritual phase in which he experienced dreams and visions. This culminated in a spiritual awakening, where he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity. He claimed that the Lord had opened his eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons, and other spirits. For the remaining 28 years of his life, he wrote and published 18 theological works, of which the best known was Heaven and Hell (1758). . . .

The point is that Swedenborg, long dead, came and taught “Mary” (Anna) Kingsford.  In essence he taught them about their own previous lives, introducing them to the reality of reincarnation.  He also taught them about the nature of God.  His followers would protest that these teachings were not his, but were Kingsford's and Maitland's.  Not unlike Zarathustra coming to Nietsche to correct an error in his teachings during his life, Swedenborg had (allegedly) come to Mary to have her undo something he got wrong in his teachings while he was still alive.  

Wikipedia’s second paragraph has this about his theology:

    Swedenborg explicitly rejected the common explanation of the Trinity as a Trinity of Persons, which he said was not taught in the early Christian Church.  Instead he explained in his theological writings how the Divine Trinity exists in One Person, in One God, the Lord Jesus Christ.

But when Swedenborg came to visit Kingsford, he said he had been wrong on several issues (pages 98-99):

    It will be interesting to remark on this experience, that to this day the followers of Swedenborg set their faces against the doctrine of reincarnation, expressly on the ground that their master denied it in his lifetime. Whether Swedenborg really denied it is uncertain. There is grave cause to doubt whether his writings on the subject have been rightly understood or fairly represented. It has been maintained with much show of reason that Swedenborg denied only the reincarnation of the astral soul, not of the true soul; in which case he would be right. Having once obtained access to us, his visits were for a time frequent, the manner of them being various. For he came to us jointly and separately, in waking and in sleeping – the latter to “Mary” only – and audibly and visibly – the latter also to “Mary” only. He alluded to a recent incarnation of mine, of which I have since had full and independent proof. And he recognised our work as not only a confirmation and continuation of his own, but also as a correction. For, as he gave us to understand, he had been too much under the influence of the current orthodoxy to be able to transmit the revelation given to him in its proper purity, and unbiased by his own preconceptions. The doctrine in respect of which he was chiefly desirous of being set right was that of the Incarnation, the orthodox presentment of which he now saw to be wrong, by reason of its deification of Jesus. In referring to the perversion of the truth by the formulators of the Christian orthodoxy, he said to us, with much emphasis, “Do not be too kind to the Christians.”

Maitland made these observations to show that their repertoire of occult communication techniques and tools included occultic visits from the dead. Maitland also had visitations from his own dead relatives, as we will note later.

One thing that was important in terms of the content of their earlier revelations was that they kept bringing them around to seeing that the key to understanding the Christian and Jewish scriptures lay in Greek mythology.  

At the beginning of their training by otherworldly sources, they were surprised to hear Hermes and John the Baptist equated.  Also, somehow 'Phoibos Apollo' had explanatory power concerning the Marriage in Cana of Galilee. (I don't quite know what that meant, but it got my attention given my recent readings suggesting Jesus married Mary Magdalene at that occasion.)

On pages 74-75:

    The signification of the connection between Hermes and John the Baptist remained unintelligible to us until the key to it was given us in a revelation of the method of the Bible-writers explaining their practice of representing principles as persons. We then found that by the baptism or purification, physical and mental, practised by John, was meant the course of life and thought whereby alone man develops the faculty of the understanding of spiritual things. And Hermes is the Greco-Egyptian name for the “second of the Gods,” called by Isaiah the Spirit of Understanding. . .

A rather mysterious saying is given on pages 75-76 that explains the importance of Hermes in their revelations and befuddles them because of a strange warning against the use of fire in preparing their food:

    A larger part was played by Hermes in another instruction received a few months later.  This was also given in sleep, the vision taking the form of a “Banquet of the Gods” in which the seeress received the following exhortation from him, in enforcement of the necessity of pure and natural habits of life for the perfectionment of the faculties requisite for full spiritual perception, when, having put into her hands a branch of a fig-tree bearing upon it ripe fruit, he said: – “If you would be perfect, and able to know and to do all things, quit the heresy of Prometheus. Let fire warm and comfort you externally: it is heaven's gift. But do not wrest it from its rightful purpose, as did that betrayer of your race, to fill the veins of humanity with its contagion, and to consume your interior being with its breath. All of you are men of clay, as was the image which Prometheus made. Ye are nourished with stolen fire, and it consumes you. Of all the evil uses of heaven's good gifts, none is so evil as the internal use of fire. For your hot foods and drinks have consumed and dried up the magnetic power of your nerves, sealed your senses, and cut short your lives. Now, you neither see nor hear; for the fire in your organs consumes your senses. Ye are all blind and deaf, creatures of clay. We have sent you a book to read. Practise its precepts, and your senses shall be opened.”

    Then, not recognising him, I said, “Tell me your name, Lord.” At this he laughed and answered, “I have been about you from the beginning. I am the white cloud on the noon-day sky.” “Do you, then,” I asked, “desire the whole world to abandon the use of fire in preparing food and drink?”

This rather perplexing question is not answered.  I thought the statement from Hermes interesting because it parallels something I learned in my Mormon years.  I believed then that God gave a revelation to Joseph Smith that said that in addition to not eating meat except in times of necessity, and abstaining from alcohol and tobacco, . . . “hot drinks are not for the body or belly.” [Doctrine & Covenants 89:9].  Kingsford would have applauded all these sentiments!

Hermes tells them they need to be more pure before he can share with them the fruit of the Tree of Life (page 76):

    “We show you the excellent way. Two places only are vacant at our table. We have told you all that can be shown you on the level on which you stand. But our perfect gifts, the fruits of the Tree of Life, are beyond your reach now. We cannot give them to you until you are purified and have come up higher. The conditions are god's; the will is with you.”

As they became more pure, the revelations flowed and the reference to the fig tree parable becomes important, and it is made very clear that, just as Joseph Smith and Swedenborg thought they had been called to restore true Christianity before the end of time, so had she –she was a seer (seeress) and a restorer (pages 76-77):

    . . . all were made clear as our education for our work proceeded, and we learnt the intention and recognised the necessity of restoring the Greek presentment of the Sacred Mysteries in explanation of the Hebrew, and in correction of the ecclesiastical presentment of Christianity. The restoration was to be twofold, of faculty and of knowledge, the knowledge to be recovered through the faculty by which it was originally obtained. Hence the insistence on our adoption of the pure regimen of the Seers of all time. Hence, too, the presentation to her by Hermes of the fig-branch bearing ripe fruit. The parable of the cursing of the barren fig-tree was explained to us as denoting the loss by the church of the inward understanding, the Intuition. In the Seeress it was restored; she was the appointed representative of it. The “time of the end” was at hand, of the approach of which the budding of the fig-tree was to be the sign. And here it was not merely budding and blossoming, but bearing mature fruit to signify that in her the faculty was restored in its perfection.

Maitland tried to get other known spiritualists to detect Anna’s gift, and one instance of this is given on pages 77-78:

    Being desirous once to test the powers of a medium to whom she was totally unknown even by name, she asked his controlling spirit about herself and her faculty. “You are not a trance-medium at all!” the spirit exclaimed in reply. “My medium is a trance-medium. You are far beyond that. You are a spiritual lens. You are a mirror in which the highest spirits – the Gods – can reflect their faces. You take the light of the whole universe and divide it so that it can be understood, as it has never been understood yet. Your gift is very extraordinary. You are a glass to reflect the highest and the greatest to the world.” This was in 1877, before she was known in connection with the spiritual movement of the age.

After this “validation” of her gift, Maitland returns to a discussion of Hermes (pages 78-79):

    The description given of himself by Hermes as “the white cloud in the noon-day sky,” proved to be a quotation from an ancient ritual, subsequently recovered by her, in which the “Hymn to Hermes” . . . opens thus: –

     As a moving light between heaven and earth: as a white cloud assuming many shapes;

        He descends and rises: he guides and illumines; he transmutes himself from small to great, from bright to shadowy, from the opaque image to the diaphanous mist.

        Star of the East, conducting the Magi; cloud from whose midst the holy voice speaketh; by day a pillar of vapour, by night a shining flame.

    All these are symbolic expressions for the Understanding, especially in respect of divine things, so that Hermes is no individual soul or spirit, but the divine spirit Itself operating as the second of the Creative Elohim, and as a function therefore of man's own spirit when duly unfolded and purified, in token whereof it is said in the recovered hymn . . . to the Planet-God Iacchos –

        Within thee, O Man, is the Universe; the thrones of all the Gods are in thy temple. ....

        And the Spirits which speak unto thee are of thine own kingdom.

Note how Maitland is slowly revealing to us that the inner voice that informs Mary (Anna) is the same force that informed the Magi through a guiding star to the Magi, and after some more words, turns out to be the same phenomenon as the ‘rock’ upon which Jesus established his church (pages 79- 80):

    As the Spirit of Understanding, the name of Hermes signifies both Rock and Interpreter. Hence the significance of the saying of Jesus,

    “Thou art the Rock, and upon this Rock I will build My Church,” which He addressed not to the man Peter, but to the Spirit of Understanding whom He discerned as the prompter of Peter's confession of faith. By this Jesus implied that the only true and infallible church is that which is founded on the Understanding, and not on authority whether of book, tradition or institution. The utterance of Jesus was a citation from the proem to the hymn to Hermes . . .  recovered by us: –

        “He is as a rock between earth and heaven, and the Lord God shall build His Church thereon.

        As a city upon a mountain of stone, whose windows look forth on either side.”

This reminded me of the Mormon teaching that it was “revelation,” not the person Peter, upon which Christ was establishing his church.  Peter was just a convenient metaphor for this solid foundation since his name meant "rock.”  But his confession of faith was revealed to his spirit: it was a revelation, and revelation is the rock upon which the church is to be founded.  Kingsford/Maitland and Joseph Smith saw this discussion between Peter and Jesus exactly the same way.

It also suggests to me that the motivation for even telling this story is the same as it was for the Mormons: to de-legitimize the claim that the true church must show an authority-lineage back to Peter.  Peter is the wrong rock!  We have the right one: revelation, knowledge coming through intuition.  At this point I believe it would be fair to say that Mary (Anna) is no longer a stalwart Catholic.  She saw herself as being called from God to restore all of Christianity, including the Catholic part.

Maitland suggests that this melding of Greek mythic knowledge and Christian knowledge was a necessary and crucial part of restoring the original Christian message (page 80):

    As our education proceeded we found indubitably that in excluding from its curriculum, the whole range of the knowledges represented by the term “Hermetic,” Ecclesiasticism has ignored the chief source of information concerning the Christian origines. Doing which it has incurred the reproach uttered by Jesus against those who took away the key of knowledge, neither entering in themselves, nor suffering others to enter in. And it was to restore this Gnosis, suppressed by the priests, that the new revelation was promised, with the reception of which we found ourselves charged, the prophecies pointing to a restoration both of faculty and of knowledge.

The oft-used word “faculty” is, of course, the ability to perceive occultic knowledge through “intuitional understanding.”

It is through this intuitional understanding that the realization came to both that the restoration that was about to take place would occur through Woman, and would begin with a particular woman.  “Mary” (Anna)  would be that particular woman.  On pages 81-83 this is wrapped into the mysteries of "the marriage in Cana” which involved the woman as “the inspirer and prompter.”  It is also wrapped up into the mystery of Daniel’s tale of the olive branch, a tale which Jesus reiterated.  Maitland spends many words on this topic, it is a convoluted story but it is important to read it because it gives us their vision of their part in the restoring and revealing of truths long lost:

    It will be seen that in the Scripture symbology, as the soul is the feminine principle in man's spiritual system, and is called therefore the “Woman,” the spirit being the masculine principle; so in man's mental system the intuition as the feminine mode of the mind is called the “Woman,” and the intellect, as the masculine mode, the “Man.” The following is the citation in question: –

        Behold the FIG-TREE, and learn her parable. “When the branch thereof shall become tender, and her buds appear, know that the day of God is upon you.”

        Wherefore, then, saith the Lord that the budding of the Fig-Tree shall foretell the end?

        Because the Fig-Tree is the symbol of the Divine Woman, as the Vine of the Divine Man.

        The Fig is the similitude of the Matrix, containing inward buds, bearing blossoms on its placenta, and bringing forth fruit in darkness. It is the Cup of Life, and its flesh is the seed-ground of new births.

        The stems of the Fig-Tree run with milk: her leaves are as human hands, like the leaves of her brother the Vine.

        And when the Fig-Tree shall bear figs, then shall be the Second Advent, the new sign of the Man bearing Water, and the manifestation of the Virgin-Mother crowned.

        For when the Lord would enter the holy city, to celebrate His Last Supper with His disciples, He sent before Him the Fisherman Peter to meet the Man of the Coming Sign.

        “There shall meet you a Man bearing a pitcher of Water.”

        Because, as the Lord was first manifest at a wine-feast in the morning, so must He consummate His work at a wine-feast in the evening.

        . . .

So the marriage at Cana and the Last Supper were symbolic, as is everything in true scripture.  Whether it is also historical, or not, is beside the point.

Note how in the following explanatory flow of the true meaning of scriptural words and events, the two Marys, Jesus' mother and Mary Magdalene, become intertwined.  They are both symbols of the Woman, the initiator and restorer in the last days:

        . . . the inward understanding has withered away, there is no discernment any more in men. They have crucified the Lord because of their ignorance, not knowing what they did.

        Wherefore, indeed, said our Lord to our Lady: – “Woman, what is between me and thee? For even my hour is not yet come.”

        Because until the hour of the Man is accomplished and fulfilled, the hour of the Woman must be deferred.

        Jesus is the Vine; Mary is the Fig-Tree. And the vintage must be completed and the wine trodden out, or ever the harvest of the Figs be gathered.

        But when the hour of our Lord is achieved; hanging on His Cross, He gives our Lady to the faithful.

        The chalice is drained, the lees are wrung out: then says He to His Elect: – “Behold thy Mother!”

        But so long as the grapes remain unplucked, the Vine has nought to do with the Fig-Tree, nor Jesus with Mary.

        He is first revealed, for He is the Word; afterwards shall come the hour of its Interpretation.

        And in that day every man shall sit under the vine and the fig-tree; the Dayspring shall arise in the Orient, and the Fig-Tree shall bear her fruit.    

        For, from the beginning, the Fig-leaf covered the shame of Incarnation, because the riddle of existence can be expounded only by him who has the Woman's secret. It is the riddle of the Sphinx.

        Look for that Tree which alone of all Trees bears a fruit blossoming interiorly, in concealment, and thou shalt discover the Fig.

        Look for the sufficient meaning of the manifest universe and of the written Word, and thou shalt find only their mystical sense.

        Cover the nakedness of Matter and of Nature with the Fig-leaf, and thou hast hidden all their shame. For the Fig is the Interpreter.

        So when the hour of Interpretation comes, and the Fig-Tree puts forth her buds, know that the time of the End and the dawning of the new Day are at hand, – “even at the doors.”

On page 84 Maitland explains that the name-change from Anna to Mary is done in part to explain through an example in their own time why it was OK for her “illuminator” (her revelator) to be switched, in name only, from the Greek Hermes to the Hebrew Daniel:

    . . .  “Mary” – to use the name which meanwhile had been bestowed on her by our Illuminators in token of her office as representative of the Soul and Intuition – confessed to some perplexity. Her usual Illuminator for revelations of this order was Hermes, whose Hebrew equivalent is Raphael. But on this occasion it had been a Hebrew one, Gabriel. Her surprise and delight were great on being reminded that Gabriel was Daniel's own inspirer in respect of the prophecy in question, and that he had prophesied his return, saying, “Go thy way, Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end. .... Thou shalt rest and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.” The explanation given us was that both Daniel's own spirit and his illuminating angel had come to her, the former serving as the vehicle of the latter. As with all our other results similarly obtained, we judged it entirely by its own intrinsic merits, and not by its alleged derivation. We knew too well the propensity of low influences to appropriate to themselves great and even divine names, and the liability of the recipients to be deceived and to make the names the criterion instead of the communication itself. But in no instance did it happen to us that we had any cause to distrust the genuineness either of messenger or of message, even when both claimed to be divine.

Notice how legitimacy is given by these visits from both ancient (Greek and Biblical) and modern (several, I have only mentioned Swedenborg) visionaries?  This was a coming together of the ages for the final act in the Earth’s drama.  It was also a way to preempt all those who followed any of these, who are now her sources: they should listen to her now, she is now their interpreter and spokesperson.

Moving from page 84 to 86 gives us more insight into the meaning of the marriage at Cana and the mode of the revelations delivered to Maitland and Kingsford:

    The difference between the two interpretations or applications given us of the incident at the “Marriage in Cana of Galilee,” was explained to us as an instance of the manifoldness of the sense of Scripture. The parables have a separate meaning for each of the four planes of existence [the four planes of existence are the body, mind, spirit, and soul]. We wondered much whether there were any parallels in history to our work and to the manner of it; and especially as to how far an association such as ours coincided with the ideas of the Hebrews. It was true that they had both prophets and prophetesses, but did they work like us in supplement and complement of each other? As regarded the recovery of knowledge acquired in a previous life, Ezra also had ascribed his recovery of the long lost Law to intuitional recollection occurring under special illumination, saying, “The Spirit strengthened my memory.” But no mention is made of a female coadjutor. Nor does it appear that the Vestal Virgins were similarly supplemented, except to be thrown into the magnetic trance-state. In her zeal for her sex and her corresponding distrust of men – sentiments which seemed to be inborn in her – “Mary” was disposed to think that most of the prophesying of old had been done by women, but that the credit had been appropriated by men. The answer to these questionings was of a kind altogether unexpected by us, both as regarded its manner and its matter. For neither of us had the smallest suspicion that the book referred to was capable of the interpretation given us of it. This was the book of Esther. The incident was as follows: –

    The occasion was an Easter Sunday, and we were at Paris. Electing to remain indoors rather than encounter the crowds of holiday makers, “Mary” was moved during the afternoon to sit for some communication by joint writing. But we were no sooner seated than it was written, –

        “Do you, Caro [Maitland’s name as given by the Illuminators], take a pencil and write, and let her look inwards, and we will dictate slowly.”

    “Mary” then became entranced, and delivered orally, repeating it slowly, without break or pause, after a voice heard interiorly, the following exposition of the book of Esther, an exposition entirely novel, as I have said, to us, and, we believed, to the world. Some divines have called the book a romance, but none have discovered that it is a prophecy in the form of a parable. Luther, indeed, pronounced both it and the Apocalypse to be so worthless that their destruction would be no loss.

    The most important book in the Bible for you to study now, and that most nearly about to be fulfilled, is one of the most mystic books in the Old Testament, the book of Esther.

    This book is a mystic prophecy, written in the form of an actual history. If I give you the key, the clue of the thread of it, it will be the easiest thing in the world to unravel the whole.

    . . .

Several pages of unraveling later, this is one conclusion:

    Later it was shown us that the parts assigned to Joseph and Mary were, in one aspect, also identical with those of Mordecai and Esther. This is the aspect in which Joseph represents the mind, and Mary the soul in the regenerate human system.

Pages 88 and 89 give further information concerning their revelations.  You may think this is a trivial collection of sentences, but hidden within it are (1) the explanations of the four levels at which we all exist and operate, and (2) the astounding idea that all revelation comes from within!  

This latter point I find fascinating because this is what Carl Jung said too, that revelation is our reaching into our subconscious archetype-filled interior, where we can even find a God-archetype.  Maitland and Kingsford seem to be unaware of Jung’s views, but I see a degree of harmony between them:

    Besides “Hermes,” “Mary” received much of her illumination from her “Genius,” her relations with whom far surpassed not only my relations with mine but any that are recorded in history, the experiences of Socrates, the chief instance on record, being insignificant both in quantity and in quality as compared with hers. It is important, therefore, to give an account of the nature and office of this order of angels, which shall be rendered in his own words.

    Every man is a planet, having sun, moon, and stars. The genius of a man is his satellite; God – the God of the man – is his sun, and the moon of this planet is Isis, its initiator or Genius. The Genius is made to minister to the man, and to give him light. But the light he gives is from God, and not of himself. He is not a planet but a moon, and his function is to light up the dark places of his planet.

    The day and night of the microcosm, man, are its positive and passive, or projective and reflective states. In the projective state we seek actively outwards; we aspire and will forcibly; we hold active communion with the God without. In the reflective state we look inwards; we commune with our own heart; we indraw and concentrate ourselves secretely and interiorly. During this condition the “Moon” enlightens our hidden chamber with her torch, and shows us ourselves in our interior recess.

    Who or what, then, is this moon? It is part of ourselves and revolves with us. It is our celestial affinity, – of whose order it is said – as by Jesus – “Their angels do always behold the face of My Father.”

    Every human soul has a celestial affinity, which is part of his system and a type of his spiritual nature. This angelic counterpart is the bond of union between the man and God; and it is in virtue of his spiritual nature that this angel is attached to him. ....

    It is in virtue of man’s being a planet that he has a moon. If he were not fourfold, as is the planet, he could not have one. Rudimentary men are not fourfold, they have not the Spirit.

    The Genius is the moon of the planet man, reflecting to him the Sun, or God, within him. For the Divine Spirit which animates and eternises the man, is the God of the man, the Sun that enlightens him. .... And because the Genius reflects, not the planet, but the Sun, not the man (as do the astrals), but the God, his light is always to be trusted. ....

    The memory of the soul is recovered by a threefold operation – that of the Soul herself, of the Moon, and of the Sun. The Genius is not an informing spirit. He can tell nothing to the soul. All that she receives is already within herself. But in the darkness of the night, it would remain there undiscovered, but for the torch of the angel who enlightens. “Yea,” says the angel Genius to his client, “I illuminate thee, but I instruct thee not. I warn thee, but I fight not. I attend, but I lead not. Thy treasure is within thyself. My light showeth where it lieth.” ....

    The voice of the Genius is the voice of God; for God speaks through him as a man through the horn of a trumpet. Thou mayest not adore him, for he is the instrument of God, and thy minister. But thou must obey him, for he hath no voice of his own, but sheweth thee the will of the Spirit.

    We noted that the inspiring angel of the Apocalypse had twice similarly spoken when the seer was about to worship him; – “See thou do it not; for I am thy fellow-servant, and of thy brethren the prophets, and of them which keep the sayings of this book: Worship God.”

    The like positive injunctions were given us also against according divine honours to Jesus.

As I mentioned at the start, another person of whom I have written on this web site is Joan of Arc.  I discuss her manner of revelation in an article on this site. So I was pleased and surprised to see this declaration from Maitland:

    Besides Socrates, there is another notable historical “Spiritualist” of whom our experiences vividly reminded us. This was Joan of Arc. The correspondence between her and “Mary,” in gifts, experiences, and personal characteristics, was of the closest. We had no difficulty in believing her history. Each of them, moreover, had a mission of deliverance, the one political and national, the other spiritual and universal.

One would think after all of the foregoing, there surely was no longer any room for doubts in their own minds about their calling and mission.  But here doubt is expressed, sort of.  It is actually another ‘teaching moment’ to underscore once again that all revelation comes from within:

    Although we had learned to trust our Illuminators implicitly long before the receipt of the above instruction, we were still without assurance as to the source and method of the revelation. Be the knowledges received by us as new as they might to our external selves, they never failed to be familiar as recovered memories, excepting in such cases as they were couched in terms of which the sense, being mystical, was not at once recognised. But such difficulties were soon overcome, and the doctrine, when fully apprehended, was always to us as necessary and self-evident truth, and such as to excite wonder at the potency of the glamour which had hitherto withheld it from the world's recognition. In every detail, the revelation represented for us Common-Sense in its loftiest mode. For the agreement it represented was not that of all men merely, but that of all parts of Man: of mind, soul and spirit, intellect and intuition, and these purified and unfolded to the utmost, and perfectly equilibrated. Whatever the manner of its communication, whether heard by the interior ear, seen by the interior eye, flashed on the mind as vivid ideas, whether acquired waking or sleeping, or in the intermediate state of trance-lucidity, or given in writing, it always seemed that we knew it before, and did not require to be told it, but only to be reminded of it.

Several pages later comes this reiteration of the fact that all revelation is internal, followed, however, by a remarkable discussion of the role of sin, and reincarnation, in redemption (pages 93-96):

    The proposal to sit for a written communication came from her, having evidently been prompted by our illuminators. The method was one which both they and we disliked, and it was adopted only when they desired to address us both at once. So we sat for writing.

    The result confirmed my surmise. We had scarcely seated ourselves when the writing began, as if we were being waited for. And this is what was written: –

        “We are instructed to say several things to-night. We are your Genii.

        “(To Caro.) In the first place, you entirely misconceive the process by which the Revelation comes to Mary. The method of this revelation is entirely interior. Mary is not a Medium; nor is she even a Seer as you understand the word. She is a Prophet. By this we mean that all she has ever written or will write, is from within, and not from without. She knows. She is not told. Hers is an old, old spirit. She is older than you are, Caro, older by many thousand years. Do not think that spirits other than her own are to be credited with the authorship of the new Gospel. As a proof of this, and to correct, the false impression you have on the subject, the holy and inner truth, of which she is the depositary, will not in future be given to her by the former method. All she writes henceforth, she will write consciously. Yes, she must finish the new Evangel by conscious effort of brain and will.”

    Coming from a source which we had learnt to trust implicitly, and according with our own highest conceptions, this message was supremely satisfactory, and was welcomed accordingly. But it was followed forthwith by another which excited feelings of a very different character. For, as if expressly in order to prevent her from being made vainglorious and uplifted by it, they added –

        “(To Mary.) It may serve to exhibit the path by which you have come, and to suggest the nature of some ancient tendencies which may yet tarnish the mirror of a soul destined to attain perfection, to learn that you dwelt within the body of –––.”

    Here were given the name and character of a certain Roman dame of some seventeen centuries ago, one of high station, but of a repute so evil as to cause an immense shock to both of us. It does not come within the design of this book to disclose the particular personalities with whom we had been identified in the past. . . . Concerning this one it must suffice to state here that, omitting from account one whole side of “Mary's” character, we both recognised in the other side traits strongly resembling those which had been indicated. And she subsequently recovered distinct recollections of scenes in the life in question which served to assure her on the point. Our discussions on the matter tended to conclusions of which fuller knowledge brought the verification. It was not one of those lives in virtue of which she was directly qualified for her present work; but it was one of those lives of which the sin and the suffering may well be conceived of as indispensable elements in the education of a soul called to a lofty work and destiny in the future, in accordance with the principle which finds expression in the sayings, “The greater the sinner the greater the saint,” and “Pecca Fortiter.” This also we discerned clearly, that, supposing it to be indeed a truth that man is “made perfect through suffering,” the experiences in the course of which the suffering is undergone must imply sin as well as pain and sorrow; since otherwise there would be a whole region of his nature, namely the moral, in which he would remain unvitalised. The lesson of which is that a man is alive only so far as he has lived. There was yet another reflection that was prompted by the occasion in question, and one which crowned and glorified the rest. This was the assurance implied that none need despair. If the soul which had dwelt in the body of the person named, could nevertheless become within measurable time what “Mary” was now, and be “destined to attain perfection,” there is hope for all, and the doctrine of Reincarnation is indeed a gospel of salvation.

I cut this discussion off, on page 96, and pick up just this one further thought on passion and sin on pages 96-97:

    This further reflection also was suggested to me: that souls of exceptional strength are reincarnated in bodies of exceptionally strong passional natures, expressly in order to obtain the discipline which comes of the effort to subdue them. All of which reflections tended to exhibit the rashness of judging outward judgment in respect of others. In order to judge righteous judgment it is necessary to know the strength of their temptations, and of their efforts to resist them. And these can be known only to God. The attainment of perfection, and therein of salvation by conquest and not by flight, – this is the principle of reincarnation. It is the condition of Regeneration, which is from out of the body.

Next comes the discussion about Swedenborg, of which I have already presented some of its content, so I will not repeat any of that here.  Moving several pages forward to page 100, we also learn that Maitland’s relatives, including his beloved wife who died of cancer quite young, were sometime visitors:

    This allusion to an experience which belongs to, the category of “spiritualism” rather than to that of our special work, may with advantage be followed by some account of our other experiences of the same order, partly for the sake of testifying to the genuineness of the experiences relied on by spiritualists, and partly in order to show the distinction between the two orders of experience, as discerned by persons whose familiarity with both qualified them to institute comparison between them. For, having once become sensitised in the inner and higher regions of the consciousness, we had become sensitised also in the intermediate regions, and were able therefore to hold palpable converse with the denizens of these also. And the converse thus held was of the most satisfactory character, on the ground both of the certainty of its reality and its intrinsic nature. Father, mother, wife, brothers, sundry dear friends, and others interested in our work, all came to me, and some of them to my colleague, and this several times, and in a manner impossible to be distrusted. For my mother more than once spoke to me aloud in her own unmistakable voice, and in tones that anyone might have heard, as I sat alone in my study. My wife came repeatedly to both of us, jointly and separately, audibly, visibly, and tangibly; giving us timely warnings of dangers unsuspected by us but proving to be real. And one of my brothers cleared up a mystery which had hung over his death. No mere attenuated wraiths or soulless phantoms were they who thus visited us from “beyond the veil,” they were strong, distinct, intelligent individualities, veritable souls, palpitating with vitality, and eager to render loving service. But they came spontaneously and unevoked, for we never sought to compel their presence. Our quest was purely and simply for truth, not for persons. But we considered that, when these also came, as they did come, to ourselves directly and without intervention of any third party, to refuse to receive them on the ground that they had put off their bodies, would be equivalent to repulsing our friends in the flesh on the ground that they had put off their overcoats.

Maitland goes on and on in this discussion showing that from these spiritualist encounters they learned by revelation that through their teachings all religions were to be integrated into one, and Eastern and Western notions would come together (pp 100-101):

        “Thou knowest that in the end, when Nirvana is attained, the soul shall gather up all that it hath left within the astral of holy memories and worthy experience, and to this end the Ruach rises in the astral sphere, by the gradual decay and loss of its more material affinities, until these have so disintegrated and perished that its substance is thereby lightened and purified. But continual commerce and intercourse with earth add, as it were, fresh fuel to its earthly affinities, keeping these alive, and hindering its recall to its spiritual ego. Thus, therefore, the spiritual ego itself is detained from perfect absorption into the divine, and union therewith. For the Ruach shall not all die, if there be in it anything worthy of recall. The astral sphere is its purging chamber. For Saturn, who is Time, is the trier of all things; he devoureth all the dross; only that escapeth which in its nature is ethereal and destined to reign. And this death of the Ruach is gradual and natural. It is a process of elimination and disintegration, often – as men measure time – extending over many decades, or even centuries. And those Ruachs which appertain to wicked and evil persons, having strong wills inclined earthwards, – these persist longest and manifest most frequently and vividly, because they rise not, but, being destined to perish utterly, are not withdrawn from immediate contact with the earth. They are all dross; there is in them no redeemable element. But the Ruach of the righteous complaineth if thou disturb his evolution. 'Why callest thou me? Disturb me not. The memories of my earth-life are chains about my neck; the desire of the past detaineth me. Suffer me to rise towards my rest, and hinder me not with evocations. But let thy love go after me and encompass me; so shalt thou rise with me through sphere after sphere.'

I liked this from pages 101-102, continuing the revelatory dialogue:

        “For the good man upon earth can love nothing less than the divine. Wherefore that which he loveth in his friend is the divine, that is, the true and radiant self. And if he love it as differentiated from God, it is only on account of its separate tincture. For in the perfect light there are innumerable tinctures. And according to its celestial affinity, one soul loveth this or that splendour more, than the rest. And when the righteous friend of the good man dieth, the love of the living man goeth after the true soul of the dead; and the strength and divinity of this love helpeth the purgation of the astral soul, the psychic ghost. It is to this astral soul, which ever remaineth near the living friend, an indication of the way it must also go, – a light shining upon the upward path that leads from the astral to the celestial and everlasting. For love, being divine, is towards the divine. 'Love exalteth, love purifieth, love uplifteth.'“

On page 105 there is yet a final explanation of the process of revelation:

    “I heard last night in my sleep a voice speaking to me, and saying –

    You ask the method and nature of Inspiration, and the means whereby God revealeth the Truth.

Know that there is no enlightenment from without: the secret of things is revealed from within.

From without cometh no Divine Revelation: but the Spirit within beareth witness.

Think not that I tell you that which you know not: for except you know it, it cannot be given to you.

To him that hath it is given, and he hath the more abundantly.

None is a prophet save he who knoweth: the instructor of the people is a man of many lives.

Inborn knowledge and the perception of things, these are the sources of revelation: the Soul of the man instructeth him, having already learned by experience.

Intuition is inborn experience; that which the soul knoweth of old and of former years.

And Illumination is the Light of Wisdom, whereby a man perceiveth heavenly secrets.

Which Light is the Spirit of God within the man, showing unto him the things of God.

Do not think that I tell you anything you know not; all cometh from within: the Spirit that informeth is the Spirit of God in the prophet.

Pages 106-107 contain the ultimate statement on the new dispensation that is now beginning.  The claim is here made that the same inspiration is now at work that was at work in Biblical times:

    Thus, for the first time known to history, was given a definition of the nature and method of inspiration and prophecy, at once luminous, reasonable, and inexpugnable, to the full and final solution of this stupendous problem; and comporting with and explaining, as it did, all our own experiences, we felt that we could bear unreserved testimony to its truth. But, vast as was the addition thus made to the New Gospel of Interpretation, it did not exhaust the treasures revealed and communicated on that wondrous night; for it was followed immediately by a prophecy of the meaning of the new dispensation on which the world is entering, and of which our work is the introduction. At once Biblical in diction and character, it reached in loftiness the highest level of Biblical prophecy and inspiration, demonstrating the same world celestial and divine as the source of both. For which reason, and the crushing blow administered by it to the superstitions which have made of Christianity a by-word and a reproach by their gross materialisations of mysteries purely spiritual, it is reproduced in full here. The heading is of our own devising: –

    A Prophecy of the Kingdom of the Soul, mystically called the Day of the Woman.

        “And now I show you a mystery and a new thing, which is part of the mystery of the fourth day of creation.

        The word which shall come to save the world, shall be uttered by a woman.

        A woman shall conceive, and shall bring forth the tidings of salvation.

        For the reign of Adam is at its last hour; and God shall crown all things by the creation of Eve.

        Hitherto the man hath been alone, and hath had dominion over the earth.

        But when the woman shall be created, God shall give unto her the kingdom; and she shall be first in rule and highest, in dignity.

        Yea, the last shall be first, and the elder shall serve the younger.

        So that women shall no more lament for their womanhood; but men shall rather say, “O that we had been born women!”

        For the strong shall be put down from their seat, and the meek shall be exalted to their place.

        The days of the Covenant of Manifestation are passing away: the Gospel of Interpretation cometh.

        There shall nothing new be told; but that which is ancient shall be interpreted.

        So that man the manifestor shall resign his office: and woman the interpreter shall give light to the world.

        Hers is the fourth office: she revealeth that which the Lord hath manifested.

        Hers is the light of the heavens, and the brightest of the planets of the holy seven.

        She is the fourth dimension; the eyes which enlighten; the power which draweth inward to God.

        And her kingdom cometh; the day of the exaltation of woman.

        And her reign shall be greater than the reign of the man: for Adam shall be put down from his place; and she shall have dominion for ever.

        And she who is alone shall bring forth more children to God, than she who hath an husband.

        There shall no more be a reproach against women: but against men shall be the reproach.

        For the woman is the crown of man, and the final manifestation of humanity.

        She is the nearest to the throne of God, when she shall be revealed.

        But the creation of woman is not yet complete: but it shall be complete in the time which is at hand.

        All things are thine, O Mother of God: all things are thine, O Thou who risest from the sea; and Thou shalt have dominion over all the worlds.”

In the new GOSPEL OF INTERPRETATION, there is no such thing as vicarious atonement!

Several allusions have already been made in the above material to differences between Kingsford/Maitland's esoteric Christian doctrines and normative Christianity's doctrines.  In CHAPTER XV, FLOODS OF LIGHT, there are several discussions of doctrine.

What sets the new Gospel of Interpretation apart from normative Christianity?  Probably the number one item is the belief that there is no such thing as vicarious atonement.  On pages 324-325 is an instance of someone claiming to have taken the punishment for a child’s misdeed with a religious expression:

        “I suffer for him. Justice is satisfied, and he is pardoned. This is Vicarious Atonement.”

    Then, as she spoke these words, a wind blew in my face, and I breathed it in, and being inspired, spoke thus, with a loud voice: –

        “O fool, to imagine that justice can be satisfied by the punishment of the innocent for the guilty! Rather is it doubly outraged. How can your being branded on the hands save the child? Hath not the Word of God declared, ‘No man shall take the sin of another, nor shall any make atonement for his brother’s trespass; but every one shall bear his own sin, and be purified by his own chastisement’? And again, is it not written, ‘Be ye perfect’? And as no one can become perfect save through suffering, how can any become perfect if another bear his suffering for him? To take away his suffering is to take away his means of redemption, and rob him of his crown of perfection. The child cannot be pardoned through your assumption of his chastisement. Only if through suffering himself he repent can he receive forgiveness. And so with the man who sins against the Creator by outraging his intuition and defiling the temple of God. The suffering of the Creator Himself for him, so far from redeeming him, would but rob him of his means of redemption. And if any declare that the Lord God hath thus ordained, the answer is, ‘Justice first, and the Lord God afterwards!’ But only through the perversion of ignorance can such doctrine be believed. The Mystery of Redemption has yet to be understood.

        “This is that Mystery. There is no such thing as Vicarious Atonement; for none can redeem another by shedding innocent blood. The Crucifix is the emblem and symbol of the Son of God, not because Jesus shed His blood upon the cross for the sins of man, but because the Christ is crucified perpetually so long as sin remains. The saying, ‘I am resolved to know nothing save this one mystery, Christ Jesus and Him crucified,’ is the doctrine of Pantheism. For it means that God is in all creatures, and they are of God, and God as Adonai suffers in them.

        “Who, then, is Adonai? Adonai is the Dual Word, the manifestation of God in Substance, who manifests Himself as incarnated Spirit, and so manifesting Himself, by love redeems the world. He is the Lord who, crucified from the beginning, finds His full manifestation in the true Son of God. And therefore is it written that the Son of God, who is Christ, is crucified. Only where Love is perfect is Sympathy perfect, and only where Sympathy is perfect can one die for another. Wherefore the Son of God says, ‘The wrongs of others wound me, and the stripes of others fall on My flesh. I am smitten with the pains of all creatures, and My heart is pierced with their hearts. There is no offence done and I suffer not, nor any wrong and I am not hurt thereby. For My heart is in the breast of every creature, and My blood is in the veins of all flesh. I am wounded in My right hand for man, and in My left hand for woman; in My right and left feet for the beasts of the earth and the creatures of the deep; and in My heart for all.’

        “(…) And because the Son of God loves, He is powerful, and the power of love redeems. He being lifted up, draws all men unto Him.

        (...) They were not forgiven because Christ died; they were changed because he loved. (...) The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin, not by the purchase of pardon with another’s gold, but because the love of God hath changed the life of the sinner.”

    Thus was it at length made absolutely clear to us that the ghastly and revolting tenet of vicarious atonement rests upon the rendering by sacerdotalism of the word for to mean instead of, when it really means in and with, as a mother suffers for her child, by sympathy.

Annie Besant would agree, as would my contemporary informants on the nature of true Christianity, like Sylvia Browne, a spiritualist much like Kingsford, who has very similar ideas and sees herself as bringing peace to the world through teaching persons of their true natures so that can, if they wish, stay in their current religious organizations, but they will be believing and operating at a much higher level than before.

Many pages follow in Maitland's book.  They describe the different types and orders of beings on the many planes of existence, and finally on pages 394 and 395 there is an exposition of the ultimate fate of souls, a doctrine obviously of interest to a thoughtful believer but never really expounded on in Christian scripture.  Note the attempt to allow for a Nirvana where all become part of God, and yet still the individual exists.  They are trying to have it both ways.  Sounds good, actually:

        “When a person dies, a portion of the soul remains unconsumed – untransmuted, that is, into spirit. The soul is fluid, and between it and vapour is this analogy. When there is a large quantity of vapour in a small space it becomes condensed, and is thick and gross. But when a portion is removed the rest becomes refined, and is rarer and purer. So is it with the soul. By losing a portion of its material it becomes finer, rarer, and purer; and it continues to do so more and more until, after many incarnations – made good use of – the whole of the soul is absorbed into the Divine Spirit, and becomes one with God, making God so much the richer for the usury. This is ‘Nirvana.’”

    Here I asked, “Is the individuality lost, then?” To which it was replied –

        “No; though becoming pure spirit or God, the individual retains his individuality. So that, instead of all becoming merged in the One, the One becomes Many. Thus has God become Millions. We, too, are Legion, and therein resemble God. God is Multitudes and Nations, and Kingdoms, and Tongues. And the sound of God is as the sound of many waters.

        “When a great and good person dies, and for any special purpose returns to earth and speaks, it is really the soul of that person who returns. But this rarely occurs long after decease. Because, as a rule, the soul has become reincarnate, or else is engaged in achieving its final purification; so that after a long interval there would be no soul to return, since it would have become pure spirit. Consequently the shades which persistently return are one of these two things. Either they are dumb shades from the bodily exhalations or mortal spirit – for everything has a spirit – or else they are astral spirits personating the dead. A soul may be utterly gross at last and deprived of all spirit of the divine order, and yet may have so strong a vitality, or mortal spirit, of its own that it may last hundreds of years in a low atmosphere. But this occurs only with souls of very strong will, and generally of indomitable wickedness. The strength of their evil will and the determination to be wicked keep them alive. These are the devils. But they are mortal, and must go out at last. Their end is utter darkness. They cease to be.

        “The shades of the dead are the Manes, Lares, and Penates of the Latins, and are to be distinguished from the soul. When Samuel appeared at Endor, it was the soul itself that returned. This was possible only because he was so lately dead. According to circumstances, souls may either become reincarnate at once, or may accomplish their purification in the sphere called the purgatorial world.

        “My Genius is not an Astral. The very suggestion displeases him. Nor was he ever embodied. He is of the order sometimes called ‘Angels,’ but he does not care for the term because it is misinterpreted. He prefers the Christian nomenclature, and to be called ‘minister,’ as their office is to guide, admonish, and illumine.

        “The origin of souls, he says, has already been explained to us in the beginning of our Alphabetical Chapters. Souls consist of substance, or original protoplasm, separated into individuated portions precisely as Spirit is separated from God. Spirit is the male, and Substance the female, principle of existence. Wherefore the soul is feminine. But my Genius dislikes the terms male and female, and prefers Father and Mother. The whole subject is very intricate; for even gross bodies have spirits. These, however, are not divine, but vital, or else animal only, and are different from that of God.

        Every molecule of matter, however minute, has a vital spirit. But this is not one with the Divine Spirit of man, which is God.

So there is but one God, made of many!  This is also a Mormon doctrine, as one can see by reading the “Last Discourse of Brigham H. Roberts” which I also discuss on this site.  One citation from the linked source is this one, of which the last statement from Maitland reminded me.  This is from Brigham Young:

Are you ready to exclaim, 'What, the Supreme in us!' Yes, He is in every person upon the face of the earth.  The elements that every individual is made of and lives in, possess the Godhead. This you cannot now understand, but you will hereafter."

Much discussion follows about Maitland's and Kingsford's recent battles with Astrals, who attempt to cause people to do things they ought not, and are what most people think of as devils inspiring evil thoughts and acts. But they are wrong, they are only Astrals, and they are playful and not often evil.  Edward was infected by them through his visits with a false medium, and through him she was also affected.  But now they were fighting them together.  I tell this tale in Part Two on courtly love, since I believe it illustrates an intense jealousy on the part of Mary: Edward had dared go to another medium!

She suggests their traveling to the clear air and sunny skies of Italy, to help them break the Astrals’ hold on them.  Always a good idea.

Since we just mentioned courtly love, one author I read long ago said that Dante and Beatrice in the Divine Comedy were the epitome of the courtly love genre.  Maybe so.  So think of my pleasure at finding Dante and Beatrice mentioned by Mary (page 396), and that the story of Dante and Beatrice lines up with her vision of reality:

        “My Genius is here. He looks like Dante, but changes from time to time. Like Dante, he is always in red. Speaking of Dante, I see that Beatrice represents the soul. She is to him what the woman should be to the man.

As quickly as Dante and Beatrice are brought up, they disappear again and we go into a rather tedious description of the spirits that can influence a person:

    My Genius tells me to say that of course you understand that the best weapon against the Astrals is Prayer. Prayer means the intense direction of the will and desire towards the Highest; an unchanging intent to know nothing but the Highest. So long as Moses held up his hands towards heaven the Israelites prevailed. When he dropped them, then the Amalekites.

        “I am to inform you that the Genius never ‘controls’ his client; never suffers the soul to step aside from the body to allow the entrance of another spirit. The person controlled by an Astral or an Elemental, on the contrary, speaks not in his own person, but in that of the spirit controlling him. And the gestures, expression, intonation and pitch of voice, change with the obsessing spirit. A person prophesying speaks always in the first person, and says either, ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ or, ‘So says someone else,’ never losing the personality. This is another sign of difference whereby to distinguish the orders of spirits.

The tales of the different spirits and powers becomes quickly boring to me, except when Mary mentions salamanders (page 397):

        . . . “Then there is an intermediate class, the Elementals. These are dangerous, mysterious, and terrifying spirits, the spirits of the Rosicrucians and medieval magicians, and of some of these days, who draw symbols and pentagrams for them; and it is dangerous to name them at certain times and places. These spirits are more material than any of the others, and have an independent existence. The most dangerous of their order are the Salamanders or Fire-spirits.

Why is this interesting to me?  Because an unscrupulous person dealing in antiquities forged a document about the beginnings of Mormonism in which, rather than an angel, a trickster salamander kept Joseph Smith from obtaining what would later become the Book of Mormon for some time.  Because there were clear indications of occultism in Joseph Smith’s earlier doings (and maybe later also) the Church was attempting to buy this document.  Perhaps to hide it away forever.  Turns out it was a forgery.  However, there is no question that Joseph Smith was an occultist, a precursor to Kingsford and Maitland in some striking ways in fact.  If you want to read more on this topic, read this online essay: “Joseph Smith: America's Hermetic Prophet,” by Lance S. Owens.  

So the salamander was just a trigger that caused me to remember my early Mormon history readings.  Am I being critical of the Mormons?  Heavens no.  The Bible is an occult document.  The Old and New testaments both contain references to occultisms: witches, séances and necromancy, throwing lots to determine the will of God, belief in devils, in a form of reincarnation, etc.  

I find it curious that mainstream Christianity is generally in denial over still having a magical world view with special ways to get God’s attention, like fasting or other acts of self-denial, that supposedly make prayers more likely  to result in some action on the part of God (through humans, or in a magical way).  Also, healings are performed and such “faith-healing” has been demonstrated to have a beneficial effect.  In some Christian religions evil spirits and devils are still being exorcised.  

It is all Biblical, and it is all magical.  The only reason it is not called magical or occultic now is because it is mainstream.  The world would be very boring if it were not for the outside chance that there really is some force we can’t touch physically and which overlays all we see with powers and influences we do not see.  Even Carl Jung added scientific fuel to this fire by suggested we could all be connected through a “collective unconscious” and that this may be what causes us to find what we need in terms of knowledge or relationships when we really need it.  May it be so. We need magic, it colorizes life!

I am skipping much material to get to this enigmatic (silly is another word for the last sentence) statement from Mary’s Genius on pages 399-400:

    . . . Speaking this evening under direction of her Genius, Mary said, “My Genius is discontented with the word ‘God’ as the expression for the Supreme, because it represents the male principle only, and is not dual. For this reason he would prefer the word ‘Jehovah,’ were it not that it is in common use with the Astrals themselves, though they have but a secondary adaptation of its mystic meaning, and have applied it, as is their nature, to the reflect instead of to the true thing. There is a word which expresses God. It is the word ‘IO.’

Thank goodness they did not attempt to please their spirit informant, and continued to use the word God in this book.

This conversation about spirits and beings and non-beings goes on and on, and they are very enamored by it all (pages 402-403).  I will cite some of it here only because it is where they again explain their mode of receiving revelation, and they address the doctrine of “grace.”:

    It would be impossible to exaggerate the eagerness with which we received and pondered these utterances, as evening after evening Mary dictated them to me after the vision seen or voice heard within, only to find instant recognition as long-lost memories of indubitable truths. Her utterance was always slow, calm, continuous, without faltering or ever being at a loss for a word, and such as more than ever to make us feel that we had indeed been permitted to tap a reservoir of boundless wisdom and knowledge. We made no attempt to control the line or direction of the instruction imparted, but kept our minds open to receive whatever might come, trusting to our illuminators to give what would be most useful, but never failing to exercise the keenest scrutiny over it. And we were pleased to notice that points which had been mentioned between us, but without thought of receiving light upon them, were often made the subject of the very next communication. Such was the occasion of the receipt of the following exposition of the doctrine of Grace, a subject which had never before engaged my attention, until reference was made to it in a conversation between us on “mortal” and “venial” sin, which was taken advantage of to interrupt the course of the instructions in progress: –

        “One of the most dangerous mysteries to place in the hands of the vulgar is that of the Doctrine of Grace. When once Union has been accomplished between the human and the Divine Wills, there is Grace. And the man under Grace cannot sin mortally. Conformity between the human and the Divine Will is the condition of salvation. And salvation is not forfeited through any specific act, unless such act be wilful and indicate a condition of rebellion. Of a man under Grace, David is a type. His heart was right with God; his intuition was unfallen. So that his many and grievous sins did not and could not alienate him from God. The man who is deliberately in opposition to the Divine Will is in far greater danger than the man who, having his intuition true, sins more flagrantly. It is not by a specific act, or many specific acts, that a soul is destroyed, but by a state of heart in constant opposition to the Divine Will. Hence the axiom of the Calvinists, ‘If you are under Grace you cannot sin’; that is, mortally.”

I am sorry to keep bringing up Mormon parallels, but the chief restorer in the Mormon faith, Joseph Smith, was said to dictate his revelations, including the Book of Mormon itself, in a very similar way (in my opinion).  Also, Smith fulminated against the doctrine of grace as it was being misapplied, and said that “men are saved by grace, after all they can do.”  He, like Kingsford and Maitland, felt grace and works were companions, as did the book of James in the New Testament.  The epistle of James, in the expressed opinion of Martin Luther, was a "straw epistle” because it contradicted his main and primary teaching, salvation by grace alone. Works are done in gratitude for being saved, already and irreversibly, by the grace Christ earned through his self-sacrifice, is how that doctrine works.  Hence the many good works being performed among the saved.

On pages 408-409 Kingsford and Maitland describe the person who has been perfected to the point where he or she . . . “is free of matter, and will never again have a phenomenal body.”  As far as I have been able to see, this is the only place in the book where they mention sexual activity explicitly (in Part Two, we saw several instances where it was implicitly discussed):

        “Who shall attain to this perfection? The man who is without fear and without concupiscence, who has courage to be absolutely poor and absolutely chaste. When it is all one whether you have gold or have none; whether you have a house and lands or have none; whether you have worldly reputation, or whether you are an outcast, – then you are voluntarily poor. It is not necessary to have nothing, but it is necessary to care for nothing. When it is all one to you whether you have a wife or husband, or whether you are celibate, – then you are free from concupiscence. It is not necessary to be a virgin; it is necessary to set no value on the flesh. There is nothing so difficult to attain as this equilibrium. Who is he who can part with his goods without regret? Who is he who is never consumed by the fires of the flesh? But when you have ceased both to wish to retain and to burn, then you have the remedy in your hands. And the remedy is a hard and a sharp one, and a terrible ordeal.

        “Nevertheless, be not afraid. Deny the body. Deny the five senses, and, above all, the Taste and the Touch. The power is within you if you will to attain it. The ‘Two Seats’ are vacant at the Celestial Table, if you will put on Christ. Eat no dead thing. Drink no fermented drink. Make living elements of all the elements of your body. Mortify the members of Earth. Take your food full of life, and let not the touch of death pass upon it. You understand me, but you shrink. Remember that without self-immolation there is no power over death. Deny the Touch. Seek no bodily pleasure in sexual communion, but let Desire be magnetic and soulic. If you indulge the body you perpetuate the body, and the end of the body is corruption. You understand me again, but you shrink. Remember that without self-denial and restraint there is no power over death. Deny the Taste first, and it will become easier to deny the Touch. For to be a Virgin is the crown of discipline. I have shown you the Excellent Way, and it is the Via Dolorosa. Judge whether the Resurrection be worth the Passion; whether the Kingdom be worth the Obedience; whether the Power be worth the Suffering. When the time of your calling comes you will no longer hesitate.

        “When a man has attained power over his body, the process of Ordeal is no longer necessary. The Initiate is under a vow; the Hierarch is free. Jesus, therefore, ‘came eating and drinking’; for all things were lawful to Him. He had undergone, and had freed His Will. For the object of the Trial and the Vow is Polarisation. When the fixed is volatilised the Magian is free. But before Christ was Christ, He was subject, and His initiation lasted thirty years. All things are lawful to the Hierarch, for He knows the nature and value of all.

Note the last paragraph.  In Part Two we saw that Kingsford suggested that Jesus and Mary M. were sexually active at the beginning of their relationship.  Now we see that there is no sin when one has reached the state of “Hierarch.”  This is a very familiar idea to those who have studied the “Free Spirit” heresy of the High Middle Ages: once you have been visited by the Spirit of God there is no longer such a thing as sin.  Sylvia Browne teaches a variant on this same theme today.

Skipping to page 414, there is an interesting exposition of the origin of the soul.  I find it interesting because already here Kingsford is expounding on something that has only recently come into the vocabulary of science: Emergent properties.  Individual chemicals have different properties from compounds made up of them, for example.  So by combining elements new properties emerge.  To be even more trivial, one cannot ride a collection of metal and glass and rubber parts, but once such parts have been assembled into a complex machine, one can drive it all over.  Properties emerge as a function of new organization.  So here Kingsford is saying that the brain, as it develops, acquires powers that attract and hold this astral material which, when placed into the correct configuration, becomes a soul.  Very interesting. Evolution also suggests that as life-forms become more complex, new capabilities emerge in them.  One of the emergent properties we enjoy is sentience.  Kingsford (and most others) believe this is an emergent property associated with the soul.  Maybe so.  It is mind-boggling, no matter what your scientific depth and vocabulary, that life emerges from increasing complexity in the arrangement of matter.  Or so it seems:

        “The soul in its first beginning is not something added to the body, but is generated in the body by the polarisation of the astral elements. Once generated, it enters and passes through many bodies until finally perfected.

        “As there are two of the outer, so also of the inner. The two of the inner are Spirit and Soul. In the translation of the Scriptures the word Spirit is often used where Soul is meant; for only the man created in God’s own image is a ‘living soul’ – that is, a soul which has the spirit superadded to it.

        “The soul, being in its nature eternal, passes from one form to another until, in its highest stage, it polarises sufficiently to receive the Spirit. It is in all organised things. Nothing of an organic nature exists without a soul. It is the individual, and perishes utterly if abandoned of the Spirit.

CHAPTER X, PERSECUTED OF APOLLYON, contained yet more interesting tidbits of occult insight.  On pages 170-171, Mary writes to Edward, in London, from Paris.  Her husband (“A.”) had just left her to come home to England and she is depressed.  As she writes from this depressed state, she sounds just like a Cathar, denying any value to living in this world.  This negative diatribe was a reaction to Edward’s mentioning that he had gone to an engagement party:

        “A. has gone, and I am all alone in Paris. Your letter is not one to cheer me. The news about the university is none of the brightest. And then, that engagement. Oh! How can people think life a desirable thing? How can they deliberately set about bringing into existence more people to share it? And how can you write calmly about it? I read that part of your letter with an absolute shudder, lest you, too, should seriously wish to find some such woman as the imaginary ‘she’ you speak of; and of downright horror at the notion of any man who knows anything, and has felt anything, desiring to introduce a new sentient creature into hell. For this is hell, and nothing else. It is a terrible thing for the ignorant and thoughtless to do; but they who know should surely give thought to the capability to suffer, which they are about to bring into being, and refrain accordingly.

This is not the normal attitude Mary exhibits towards life in this world, it is a seriously depressed life-view, but similar to the life-view of Cathar leaders. Were all Cathars clinically depressed?  Many were poor, saw starvation as a constant threat, and saw their richer overlords and ecclesiastical leaders abuse them continually and yet go worship this glorious God who favored only them.  

That can be very depressing when there is no way out except death.  So Catharism gave them a way out now, at least in their hearts and heads, and the healing balm was knowing that they, not their abusers, were likely to reach the throne of God long before their tormentors would get their chance, if they ever did.

The next chapter is CHAPTER XI, THE BAFFLED SORCERER, and it is about a medium come to England from America whom Maitland, just returned from Paris, attempts to “test.”  We looked at this once already in Part Two.  We will look at it again here, but in part only, from a different point of view.  This time we are looking for keys to the mode of revelation these two people experienced and believed in, and we are looking for doctrinal tidbits to chew on.

On pages 211-212 he is made comfortable by this man, named Fletcher, and told he would soon be overtaken by his control (note how he is praised here as an old and superior soul, compared with how in a jealous moment Mary upbraids him mercilessly and calls him an inferior spirit, in essence):

    . . . [he] passed under the control of what purported to be the spirit of a red-Indian girl named Winona, who was his familiar. Having obtained control of him, she greeted me with a nod of her medium’s head, and then began to speak. Her speech was illiterate and replete with homely Americanisms, but highly vivacious and intelligent, and her deportment pleasing and without vulgarity or pretentiousness. Then, speaking very rapidly and in a tone of amazement, she exclaimed –

        “What is the meaning of all that I see? There is something here very unlike what most people – what all other people – have. I do not want a lantern to see into you. There is no lack of light, as with most. But you have about you, not only spirits, a number of them, and greater and higher than any I ever saw before, but a number of things – I don’t know what to call them – things which look odd and unmeaning to other people; but they have a meaning in them, a very deep meaning, and you understand it; and when you do not, your high spirits tell it to you. Sym – sym – thank you” [this as to an invisible prompter] – “symbols, they are called, though I do not know what that is, for the spirits who have come to tell me what to say to you are forced to use higher and harder words than I and my spirits require. You did not come here of yourself. You tried not to come; but you had to come. Your spirits sent you that they might speak to you through me. You must not think that what I say to you comes from myself or my medium. I shall say only what they tell me, so far as I can say it after them. And, oh, what spirits yours are! There are three by you now; they are so high they overshadow the earth, and they give you truths which are not personal, not national merely, but are for all men, for all the race. I see them reaching far, far away beyond the planet, beyond the system, to bring you from the stars the fruits of the universe! Yes, that is the phrase they tell me to speak, the fruits of the universe. All these they bring to you and pour into your mind. But not for yourself only. You would not care for them if they benefited yourself only. They are for the world, which you are working, with the great world-spirits’ help, to improve. Let me see, let me see.” [Here she spoke musingly, as to herself.] “How is this? Oh, I see. It is the love in the man. The love is so strong it has drawn these great spirits to him.” [Then in her previous tone she continued.] “Between them and you there is a medium, one who was long ago in the earth-life, and who had such a career as you appear to me to have before you, – a career that only one man in numberless ages has. And he acts as medium between the spirits and you, as I do between my medium and the spirits who tell me what to say. But there is a difference, a great difference. I will tell you what it is. I have to put my medium’s consciousness aside when I speak through him, because I cannot impress on his mind what I wish. But your spirits have no need to do this with you.  They are able to put their thoughts into your mind. That is because you are in perfect harmony with them. They do not set aside your consciousness. They make it more, larger, without altering it; they – yes, that is the word no doubt – thank you” [aside] – “they tell me to say they enhance your consciousness without depriving you of your own individuality. And they are able to do that by reason of your being in perfect harmony with them. Your, your – intuition? – yes, your intuition is pure. It is through this that they can bring you the fruits of the universe. I know only one man now on the earth who sees thoughts at all like those you see. It is the American seer, Andrew Jackson Davis. Your spirits will do much, oh! So much more for you yet than they nave done. All you have done is as nothing to what you will do. But it will only be after a time. It is for you to rest now. Your rest will not be idleness or waste of time. It is necessary for your future work, when you will require all your power.”

        After a short pause, passed in silence, she continued: – “Dear me, how oddly you live! No stimulants! No – what people call – generous food! Oh, I see why it is. Your spirits have put away from you all those things, not for your own sake – you are sound, you have no disease whatever – but for the sake of the work they have for you to do. Yet you want more strength, more nourishment. Yes, you live too much alone, or with people who are too much like yourself, and who take from you instead of letting you take from them. You must give this up and go among people who are exactly the opposite to yourself – people who will amuse you. Why, you never are amused! You are always thinking and feeling! You live as if you had had your physical life and your intellectual life, and had passed out of them into your spiritual life. That would be all very well if you had not still a physical and mental organism, which are to be used and cared for while you have them. And you have them and will want them. Why do you not let yourself have amusement?

        “Ah! I see the how of it; you have lost your friends. They have dropped off as you have risen to the spiritual life. Yes – and they are not far from thinking you mad. Let them think so now. Some day, not very long hence, they will all fall at your feet and acknowledge you. Even if they do not fully understand you, they will not think you mad then. I said you had no friends. You have no relations either! Those who are your relations in the flesh are not your relations in the spirit. There is no kin between you; and they have left you now. That comes of your spiritual growth. You have been incarnate so many times that you are a long way advanced. I think you will be incarnate again. People are incarnated so long as there is an experience to be gained in the flesh-life by which they can benefit spiritually.”

This has got to be feeding his ego!  He asks a very selfless question on page 212 which is answered on page 213:

    Here, speaking for the first time, I asked, with a theological motive, "May one not be incarnated for the sole benefit of others?"

        “No; if you can do no good to yourself, you can do none to others. What a reserved life you have led! No one has ever known you. You have lived among people as a stranger, seeing right through them, but letting no one see through you. Always silent! Oh, how silent you have been! And you have resisted so many impulses, refused so many things, which, if accepted, would have given you valuable experiences. You have looked at them and wished for them, and not being able to see clearly what they would lead to, have let them slide by. You could not be satisfied with phenomena. Your own spirit always seeks towards spirit in everything. And now, by waiting and thinking and wishing, you have got something far above and beyond all you ever imagined, something all spiritual too.

        “Can I see anything about your work and associates? I am looking only at you and what is about you now; but I am impressed to follow you and learn more about you. You are, and have, and will be what I have never known before. I may help you, though I am but an Indian girl. They call me Winona. I can do good by helping you. I shall follow you and find out all I want to know. I never was in such company as that of your spirits. They sent you to me, and not for nothing. One thing was for your health. They want you to live a grosser life. That is not a nice word. I don’t know how to put it, – yes, generous; that is the word again. You must get up your physical strength by living more in the lower world, and resting your mind and spirit. That is all I am to say to-day.”

Who would not be “hooked” after that?  He returns on the 25th (pages 213-214):

    On resuming the sitting on the 25th, Winona, after greeting me, turned to a chair beside the medium, and similarly greeted a spirit by whom she said it was occupied. This, she declared was the spirit of my wife, who had long since passed away from the earth and out of my present life, but was often with me. Many spirits, Winona added, were in the habit of visiting me for the sake of learning what I was being taught by the spirits who had me in charge, and whom, through the wide difference of their respective spheres, they could not approach in their own world; while they could all come to me and use me as a common meeting-ground for communication. And she continued –

        “Among those who are in the habit of coming to you is your father. He is an orthodox man – oh, so strictly orthodox! You and he could not agree about religion in the earth-life, but now he is forced to come to you to learn. He learns very slowly, for his mind was always covered with locks and keys to keep out anything that was not orthodox. You consider him a conscientious man.”

    The word was in my mind as applicable.

        “So he was in his human relations; but I do not consider him one in his religious opinions, else we must mean different things by that word. I do not call it conscientious when one refuses to look at an opinion because it is new to one, and does not appear to harmonise with what one already holds. That was what your father did. He had made up his mind, without any reason, that he had all the truth, and so would not look at anything that was new to him. In that he was not conscientious, as I, call it. He has now opened only a few of the locks on his mind, but he is learning from you as fast as he can.”

    This description of his character and opinions, and of our relations, was absolutely exact.

This goes on and on, with her talking occult esoterica.  I stop extracting until I get to topics I am interested in, like the idea that the salvation of the world will come through Maitland becoming as Mithras and Krishna and Buddha and Jesus.  This is where I start extracting again, on pages 215-216:

    “Mithras!” I then named Krishna and Buddha, to which she as eagerly assented; and then added Jesus, saying, “Nearly all these, and many others, died on the cross after an hour’s sharp agony. They were the great souls who perished in seeking to save the world; whom the world slew, and afterwards worshipped. And they now form a great spiritual constellation, and from their high place are seeking again to save the world; and on you has the task fallen to represent and combine all that they were and taught. Where they were crucified to the death in one short agony you will be crucified, but not to the death. Your suffering will be longer, but not so sharp – at least not your physical suffering. The world you are to save through love will turn against you – as it has already begun to do – and will vilify and denounce and threaten you. And you will keep on your course, knowing that you are right and are guided by high influences, and that the love which animates and impels you will at length melt the hardest heart. And so the time will come when you wilt stand with one hand reaching up to heaven and clasping the great spirits of God, and the other reaching down to earth and clasping all mankind; and thus, through you, as medium between earth and heaven, will flow down in an abundance never known since the Fall all the blessings that God has in store for His redeemed children. Thus shall you stand, escaping the death of the cross on which you will be stretched, and succeeding this time in accomplishing the work of redemption. Then will all they who scourged and persecuted you come to you on their knees, and deem no offering too rich, no flower too fair, to be cast at your feet. And you, seeing them and their gifts, will smile, but will not stay to enjoy; for at that moment your work on earth will have been accomplished, and you will – not die, as men call dying, but – part, gently and without a pang, to enter upon the fruition of those gifts and flowers of eternity, of which the best that earth can boast are but a faint reflection. Thus translated, you will still rule over men, by force of love drawing them up towards you. That is what the spirit tells me to say. I don’t half understand it, only I know it is something very grand. I never had to speak to anyone in that way before, I reckon.”

He was very taken with this description of his mission, to say the least.  On page 217 he again gets my attention when he discusses his role in carrying out another cycle in the solar myth:

    Not the least striking part was the reference to Osiris and his fellow-Christs, the “Solar Myth” having been for me a subject of special study. But the utterance did not coincide with the conclusion to which I inclined. This was the conclusion that, while all such personages represented the higher potentialities of man, some only of them had an historical existence, the rest being imaginary personifications of one and the same doctrine. Respecting the actual presence, as alleged, of any personage of the kind, I was exceedingly sceptical, notwithstanding our experiences with the “demon” Paris, and was disposed to regard the entity described as operating on my behalf as, possibly, one of an order of spiritual influences bearing that name in token of some special function.

Now we get to the part of the Fletcher/Winona revelations that describe another episode of jealousy involving an older professor simply identified as O.  I already extracted that story for Part Two.  In Part Two we also looked at revelations from Mary saying she essentially interviewed Christ in the guise of Mary Magdalen.  Very interesting both from a courtly love (hence it is in Part Two) and an occult insight perspective.  But I will not repeat it here.

In Chapter 20 (the first chapter in Volume 2), a chapter called “The Perfect Way,” Mary has a revelation that caught my attention because it involves the “mysteries of Venus” and the “kingdom of Love” (pages 1 through 3), which to me must involve the physical, sexual component of being human:

    The event was preceded and heralded by a singular experience, and one that at first caused Mary considerable perplexity. She had been eagerly anticipating the revelation of the mysteries of Venus, to use the Latin name for this divinity, thinking that they must be yet more exquisite than the rest, but failing to see how there could be room for such superiority. While in this frame of mind she received in sleep, from a source the nature of which was concealed from her, as intimation that she could not expect to have given to her the mysteries of the kingdom of Love while leading an ascetic life. This she reported to me; when – divining the stratagem – I was able to reassure her by the suggestion that it was at once a test and a lesson the purport of which was to direct her attention to the greatness of the contrast subsisting between the mysteries inner and outer, spiritual and physical, of the same principle. And I hazarded the prediction that the next full moon, then near at hand, would–as so often before–bring the desired revelation. And so it proved. For on the night of March 15, the moon being at its full, she received that most precious of all the “precious things brought forth by the moon” – as said in Deuteronomy – the hymn entitled, “A Discourse of the Communion of Soules, and of the Uses of Love between Creature and Creature, being part of the Goldene Booke of Venus.” For, like most of the things read by her in sleep, it was in archaic spelling.

    During the following morning, without telling me what had occurred, she sat writing, book in lap, for an unusually long period, completely absorbed. At length she rose from her seat, and with a heavy sigh put her book away in her private drawer without speaking. Recognising and respecting her evident desire for privacy in the matter, I refrained from making allusion, to it, intensely eager though I always was to learn the subject of her inspirations. The following morning saw her similarly engaged for an equal space. Having at length finished her task, she called to me in jubilant tones – for we were sitting in different divisions of the drawing-room – to come and hear what she had written; whereupon she {read} to me the hymn she had been writing down, and was delighted to find that my appreciation corresponded to hers. After I had remarked that its style reminded me of the Imitation of Christ, and that the two might really have come from the same source, she told me the following history of it: –

    The volumes of Scriptures which had attracted her attention . . . had dwelt in her mind, making her long to return and read them. The longing seemed to have but awaited the next full moon to adopt my suggestion and fulfil itself. . . . We recognised it as the first expression the world had ever seen of really Christian doctrine. In talking about it she remarked with much emphasis, “The world has but to know that hymn for it to be the death-blow of vivisection.” We wondered much – as about so many of its companion scriptures – whether it had ever before seen the light on this planet. The only thing that suggested the probability was a dream received shortly afterwards, in which Mary saw some lines in Italian which seemed to her to be a translation of the beginning of it.

What I was expecting to read next is nothing like what was written.  But since it did bring back Cana of Galilee and rituals taking place there, I copied this.  Mary is here looking at the Great Pyramid in trance vision:

    . . . it appeared to her as if she was once there herself, her sensations about it being so much like a memory, and that she saw the ceremony of initiation actually taking place. She then added: –“I see that, although I have been initiated once or twice, I have never been regenerated. Nor have you, though you, too, have been initiated. Most initiation in our day took place in the Great Pyramid. There was a cave of initiation at Cana of Galilee. The story of the marriage-feast and the miracle of turning water into wine has reference to the final initiation of Jesus. The water was the symbol for the soul, the wine for the spirit. ‘The beginning of miracles’ for the man regenerate is the spiritualisation of his own soul, which is therefore mystically called the changing of water into wine.”

So if Kingsford is correct, Jesus did not really change water to wine at Cana, but was initiated to make his soul whole.  Perhaps that included marrying Mary at Cana, as our modern informants would have it.  The water and wine, soul and spirit melding is a reference to the merging of the male and the female, a marriage of sorts, inside each person.  

Kingsford said several times that whether the Biblical stories were true or not did not affect their ability to tell an occult truth.  Perhaps it goes the other way too, just because an occult truth is illustrated by a story does not mean that something, or something in addition, did not historically happen.

Like every other restorer, Kingsford and Maitland had their own end-of-the-world prophecy (pages 3 and 4):

    The following coincidence struck us as curious in view of the circumstance that the year 1881 was the date supposed by so many to be indicated in the Great Pyramid as that of the “end of the world.” On inquiring at the reading-room of the British Museum for a book on the Pyramid, we were referred to shelf 1881. The officials to whom we pointed out the coincidence were greatly amused thereat. We refrained from telling them, strong as was the temptation to do so, that the prophecy was actually in course of fulfilment, and that the world was really coming to an end in that year in the sense intended.

Getting back to what interest me most in this narrative, here is more about Mary Magdalene.  

    Describing, also under illumination, the events which occurred between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, as recorded in Clothed with the Sun, Part I, Nº. XXXIII, Mary said: – “Jesus instructed His friends beforehand what to do. Joseph of Arimathea was a friend of Mary Magdalen, and she procured for him the requisite balms. I see her running with them through the sepulchre to the house. I have a most curious sensation, feeling as if, somehow, I were in Mary and were she.”

They received instructions that baffled them about their diet.  This reminded me again of the Cathars.  The only flesh a Cathar Perfect could eat was fish!

    He says I must not lecture under my own name, and he wishes us both to eat fish for some time to come. All these things belong to different mysteries, and they must not be confused. In the mysteries of Demeter it is an abomination not to eat vegetables. In the mysteries of Aphrodite it is an abomination not to eat fish.”

Another revelation of the same type encourages their consumption of fish again and speaks of the caste system they are to be aware of, caste here meaning what level of the mysteries one can be entrusted with (a true Gnostic notion not unknown in modern religions either, for example the Mormons require a period of proving oneself prior to being exposed to their higher mysteries in temples):

    “They wish us to eat fish for the present; not for occult or mystic reasons, but to enable us to perform the hard intellectual work before us. Fish contains Iodine, and is necessary for us both, especially for you. The prohibition about fish related to the highest mode of life. These things are matters of Caste or Degree, and we are not yet of the highest; so that it is not obligatory on us to abstain from fish.

    My Genius says that we are, above all things, to teach the doctrine of Caste. The Christians made a serious mistake in requiring the same rule of all persons. Castes are as ladders whereby to ascend from the lower to the higher. They are properly spiritual grades, and have no relation to the outward condition of life. Like all other doctrines, that of Caste has been materialised. The Castes are four in number, and correspond to the fourfold nature of man.

    . . .

I was quite surprised to see this sort of discussion in a revelation coming through a medical doctor, but it did remind me of similar speculations during the early days of Mormonism, especially Brigham Young’s constant streams of advice on ideal dress, diets, and work:

    “Many particulars are shown me about the diet, dress, and mode of living necessary to complete regeneration, but all quite impossible to be carried out. One in particular is about the covering of the feet. To walk barefoot on grass and earth would aid immensely in regenerating the body. Coverings on the feet – especially of leather – shut off the magnetism. The feet ought to be bare, and frequently bathed in cold water. The hair should be kept long, too, as it is then a powerful agent in promoting magnetism. Food should be cold and uncooked, and no fermented drinks used. Cakes should be sun-baked in a kiln, that the particles may become polarised by the sun’s magnetism. I see a row of cakes being baked in this way in Egypt; but in this climate such things are impossible to us, and we must be content to live and die. Irregular polarisation and false foci create disease – local disease, that is, which is due to a false focus, which makes the poles converge to a false centre.”

At the end of this chapter there is a very familiar sounding theme of not being able to turn back, knowing what they knew, and knowing who knew what they knew, regardless of the opposition.  This must be a stock motivational expression on the part of restorers.  I swear that something almost identical was written by Joseph Smith as he suffered persecution for his restoration movement (the Mormon restoration, still in progress).

This from pages 5 and 6:

    In such manner was knowledge poured in upon us, in a steady and abundant stream, until the time came when it was necessary to prepare for the promulgation which, by accomplishing the doom of the “evil and adulterous generation” which has been in possession ever since the Fall, was to be the “end of the world” as it has hitherto been; and the inauguration of that new and better order of things variously implied in Scripture under the images of the reign of Michael, the fall of Lucifer and Satan, the breaking of the seals and opening of the books, the budding of the fig-tree, the resurrection and ascent of the two witnesses, the flight of the angel in mid-heaven having an eternal gospel to proclaim, the exaltation and illumination of the woman, the Battle of Armageddon, the second coming of Christ, and the revelation and destruction of “that wicked one,” the controlling evil spirit of the world’s selfish sacrificial system in Church, State, and Society, and the coming of the kingdom of God with power, – the whole stupendous programme of which was to be accomplished by the simple means of a new “Gospel of Interpretation”, such as was being vouchsafed to us, and the time for the promulgation of which was now at hand.

    That such claim on our part would be universally deemed a presumption as blasphemous as audacious, and these even to convicting us of stark staring madness, we were fully aware. But no consideration of what others might think gave us a moment’s concern or hesitation, if only because we knew that we knew, and we knew that they did not know. We had put our hands to the plough which was to run so stupendous a furrow through the field of the world with our eyes wide open; and so far from dreaming of looking back in view of what treatment might be accorded to us or our message, we took delight in fixing our gaze in anticipation upon the rich crop of blessings to the world which would spring from our labours. We knew, too, in whom we trusted; for had not all the spheres from the bottomless pit of man’s lower nature to the throne of the Most High been opened to us, and to us alone of modern times, enabling us to compare and estimate their respective values? And if danger threatened us for going on at the hands of the former, what was that to the danger at the hands of the latter for turning back? While, as for presumption, what presumption could approach that of putting ourselves in opposition to the Gods – manifested as they had been to us – by declining to execute their divine behests?

I am now skipping to the very last chapter “CHAPTER XXXVII AND LAST.” It was written by Maitland well after Mary/Anna’s death.  This chapter would be very sad except for the fact that Mary is able to communicate with Maitland after her death.  Of course.  At first, Maitland consults and uses a sensitive, a medium to communicate with her (page 413):

    On becoming lucid she said, without my having given her any clue, that my friend Mrs. Kingsford was present, “But she now calls herself Mary, and not A.K., as before, and is so much better and sweeter-looking, as if at her very best in every way.” And she asked me to explain the change of name and appearance. After I had told her that by calling herself “Mary” instead of A.K. she meant she was present now in the soul, and not merely in the astral form, which would account also for her radiant look, the sensitive continued: –

    “I am told to tell you that she has been much with you, and finds you more sensitive to her presence than at first; and that you have carried out all her wishes very well indeed, and she is quite certain that you are impressed by her. She fears, however, to press you too soon with what might be premature; but your time is short for doing all that there is for you to do, and she finds it hard not to be impatient to get all said that she wants to say to you. She fears also that you and she may be misunderstood by the great majority. Those who have the inner light will understand, and she desires to reach the rest by making plainer what has already been published. You must therefore put it into simple and child-like language, if the masses are to be reached. For the mission, she now sees, is not to the few, but to the many, to the all. You alone have charge of the inmost truth. All others have failed either to receive or to accept the pure truth; and for want of understanding it, they have distorted it. I am to tell you that it has been revealed to her that an attempt will be made to upset your work by depreciating it and you and her, but she cannot say by whom or how. But you must stand firm, knowing you have the truth. The attempt is already being made in some quarters. There are two great classes who will be against you: those who deny all revelation whatever, and those who take the so called Christianity as their standard, and turn against all who have a different interpretation. Your worst opponents are not the unbelievers, but the misbelievers.”

This communication continues on page 414:

    Her function in our joint work, she added, was essentially reflective. She was given to me to be a mirror to reflect to me the universe and man. It had originally been intended that she should also portray to the world the highest type of womanhood; but there was too much else to be done, and our actual work, that of interpretation, was considered the most important to be done first. The world could not go right so long as it has a false religion. It was then intimated that our conversation must now close, as she could not remain long with any medium. When I was better she could remain any length of time with me, and she would then inspire me with all that she had to say. Meanwhile, to that end, I was to follow a certain mode of life, of which particulars were given me, and the wisdom of which I fully recognised. To my parting expressions of affection it was responded that there was no need for us to give our love to each other; for that is a perpetual possession between us – a fixed, unalterable fact, recognised by both, and not needing words. For it dates from long ages past, as we had been together in the closest union in many lives, and shall be hereafter. She has no thought now but for me and the work. But although that makes her an “earth-bound spirit” in one sense, it does not make her one in the bad sense, in which the term is commonly understood. For she is remaining below voluntarily in order to do good.

    Sitting again, October 13 [1888], Mrs. H. said: –

    “Your friend is here, and I am to tell you that she finds you greatly increasing in sensitiveness to her presence; and she will soon be with you in a more palpable way, for she prefers greatly to converse with you direct, and with you only. There is so much that she wants done which you alone can do. It is through you alone that she is to speak to the world. For you alone can perfectly understand her. She is greatly pleased with what you have written since the last visit. . . .

There are many additional words of this nature, but two things in the remainder of the chapter were of special interest to me: (1) relations with the Theosophists now that Mary was dead, given that Blavatsky wrote a highly complimentary obituary about her in her own publication, and (2) and traces of courtly love in addition to the idea above that they had been lovers in previous lives and would be again!  On pages 421-422 he addresses a question about the Theosphists, and it is a revelation from Mary, through a medium, that he is now recounting:

    To a question put by me about the Theosophical Society, The Secret Doctrine and its influence on our work, it was replied: –

        “The ultimate effect of that Society will be to help your work. It will have acted as a great net to draw people to these subjects; but they will not long remain at the Society’s level, but will rise towards yours. That Society’s work fell into about the worst hands into which it could have fallen. There were no good instruments, and such as were available had to be used. They will pass away and be succeeded by better ones, and you will find that movement has been a great help to yours. Madame Blavatsky’s sources of information are partly from study, and partly, as she states, spiritual, but reflective or astral rather than original and Divine, the truth being greatly obscured and distorted. Reading her book is like wading into a sea of mud to find a single little pearl. In all you write you should explain fully, and you will have nothing to recall; and remember that whatever you say will endure for ever.”

    Startled by this last utterance, I remarked, “You mean whatever I say with full perception.” To which it was replied, with much decision, “I mean whatever you say. You will be allowed to say nothing without full perception.”

    The sitting concluded with an injunction to use the medium only on an emergency, and to seek directly to Mary herself, as it was almost a sacrilege for any third person to come between us.

On pages 423-424, Maitland tells of a conversation with H.B.P. Blavatsky. Not one of Mary’s favorites, even after death:

    Speaking with Madame Blavatsky of these and other experiences, I remarked that her attitude towards spiritualism failed to take account of phenomena such as ours. To which she replied very emphatically that nothing that she said about spiritualism applied to persons like us, but only to persons who are quite undeveloped in their spiritual nature, as the spiritualists are as a rule, and who can therefore hold intercourse only with phantoms and spooks, and such other low orders as correspond to their own level. What I had told her confirmed the belief she already had, that Mary had become what the Hindoos call a Nirmâna-kaya. That is an order of souls who have to such extent been adepts in their lifetime, and so far perfected their spiritual principles, that after death they are free, and able to renounce their right of immediate ascent to higher conditions, and remain within reach of the earth in order to influence and instruct persons who are still living on it.

So, at this point Blavatsky thought better of Kingsford than Kingsford thought of Blavatsky.

This last chapter in the book is the chapter cited at the end of Part Two which led to the exclamation (on my part) that these last revelations showed Maitland that it was all true: these two restorers were opening up the new world to replace the old one, which was coming to an end.  

They lived together as saints and opened the doors to the celestial worlds very wide to let truth shine into the darkness.

But, the darkness perceived it not!

Why did I say that the darkness perceived it not?  Because their movement essentially ended when Maitland died.,  The editor of the edition I was using, Samuel Hopgood Hart, who worked with Maitland for some time, wrote the following rather sad note about the demise of this restoration movement:

    . . .

    The Esoteric Christian Union did not survive the President-Founder. At the end of the first year of its existence its list comprised “some sixty members and numerous sympathisers,” but the Society was never much before the public. From the start it suffered from insufficiency of means. Few of the members were “of the richer sort.” There was never any money available for public meetings, for readings and expositions. By the rules, members were not bound to contribute anything towards the funds of the Society, contributions being optional. The Society also suffered from lack of workers. The writer joined the Society in 1894, and from that time there was never a general meeting of the members. Edward Maitland, as and when opportunity offered, delivered lectures and addresses, usually to private circles of students and inquirers in London and the suburbs, and he wrote numerous articles expository of the New Interpretation in various periodicals, notably in The Agnostic Journal, The Vegetarian, Light, and The Unknown World. For all practical purposes, Edward Maitland himself was the Society.

    . . .

What have I learned from these lives?  

That courtly love creates and sustains a powerful creative force?  It seems so.  

That there have been a number of restoration movements trying to bring Christianity back to its roots, and that its roots grew in to soils of knowledge we now call the occult?  It seems so.  

Everything ancient has an occultic or magical flavor to it, reflecting the “science” of the time, the interpretation of individually  and collectively perceived reality.

That idea of a personal reality brings me to Maitland and Kingsford.  Those two were blessed to have some slight modicum of wealth.  This is what allowed them to live in a reality of their own making,  Not that they were rich, they were comfortable is all.  But this meant they did not need to adopt or at least imitate the mores and standards and beliefs of their greater society just to blend in and be able to find work and survive.  They could afford to be different, and get away with it.  

That ever-frayed edge of society where Maitland and Kingsford lived is what keeps it stretched and moving, making society alive and interesting.

So may it always be.

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GO BACK TO PAGE TWO: AN INSTANCE OF COURTLY LOVE

AN ADDENDUM ABOUT MARY MAGDALENE and 'MARY' KINGSFORD

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