Have researchers found a
skeleton in Emma’s cupboard?
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Leslie Price: Respected
researcher and historian of
the Spiritualist movement. |
Have researchers found a skeleton in Emma’s cupboard? Emma Hardinge Britten (1823-1899) is best known as the medium for the Seven Principles of Spiritualism. She was the leading early Spiritualist historian, whose works are still indispensable today. But she was also involved in a literary controversy, which has just been revived by a new book.
From her early years, Emma had occult involvements; she describes in her autobiography how she was a child sensitive, employed in mesmeric experiments.
In the 1870s, it looked like she might pursue an occult path separate from Spiritualism. The first signs were occult narratives contributed to her short-lived 1872 periodical The Western Star. Then she and her husband William Britten became practitioners of “electrical healing”, on which she wrote a book.
In 1875, they were founder members of the Theosophical Society in New York, which was actively interested in powers latent in humans that went beyond mediumship, such as astral projection. She was in daily contact with its corresponding secretary Madame Blavatsky, and president Henry Olcott. Indeed, years before, she and Olcott had lodged in the same house.
It was in 1875 that Emma circulated a prospectus for a book which would contain the results of a European gentleman’s researches into nature’s most profound mysteries. Subscribers would pay $5 in advance, and be limited to 500 in number. This book, Art Magic, was published in Spring 1876.
It was not in the main a book on Spiritualism, nor a practical treatise on magic, but an exposition of magnetism and psychology, with a significant role in phenomena given to non-human spirits. Though the Brittens had produced the book, and assisted in the editing, Emma was supposedly not the author.
Emma Hardinge Britten
Not everyone was impressed. One Theosophical reviewer dismissed it as a rehash of generally available works. The physical medium Daniel Dunglas Home wrote that it was partly rubbish. Andrew Jackson Davis denounced this “Magical Spiritualism”. Henry Olcott later suggested that far more than 500 copies were printed, and that it was less exclusive than claimed.
Nevertheless the book was influential, and many later writers on popular occultism borrowed extensively from it. And although the origin of some of the material in Art Magic was clear, it was not known from where other parts derived.
Now, a new edition of Art Magic has appeared which lifts the veil on the mystery. It is edited by Marc Demarest, the Oregon (USA) custodian of the indispensable website www.ehbritten.org. This breakthrough has been possible because computer technology and online databases like Google Books enable the instant comparative perusal of texts word by word. An author may conceal the source of a phrase, but a web search can reveal it, and indeed a whole pattern of borrowing.
Thus the French mesmerist Cahagnet around 1848 has a paragraph in his book about “a life of trials, none can escape it” as has Art Magic (1876) and later R. Swinburne Clymer, a Rosicrucian author in 1907. Side by side, the resemblances in the paragraphs are unmissable.
A textual study of Art Magic discloses heavy borrowing from various authors, some unsuspected and obscure. But it is the nature of those authors that makes the European gentleman behind Art Magic fade like the Cheshire Cat. The sources are in the English language, almost up to the year of publication, of the kind that a literary Spiritualist might have in her library. They are not “European” or “translated”.
Moreover the opinions and style of the author of Art Magic are very close to those of Emma. He wants to train mediums in a school of prophets, for example, just like she does. There’s one possible exception. The author gives a bigger place to non-human spirits in the production of phenomena than most Spiritualists, but although it is not often noted, Emma did write of her experiences of such entities.
If Emma invented the European gentleman to disguise her own authorship, why did she do it? Was it simply a matter of making money by selling occult 'secrets' that sounded better from an exotic teacher?
Well, we should not discount economic necessity. Since her father died in her childhood, Emma had often supported her mother. She had worked as an artist’s child model, a musician, an actress, a lecturer, an author andt an electric physician. In addition, she had acquired a husband whom she may also have supported.
US Spiritualism in 1875 was a declining market – partly because of fake mediumship exposures, free love scandals, and new competition from Theosophy.
Emma had a message: better training of mediums, no to dark séances, no to reincarnation (whose teaching was spreading), and no to free love. To have another voice supporting her, whose words she wrote, was very useful.
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Madame Blavatsky
(public domain)
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For the rest of her life, Emma stood by the reality of the European gentleman. Sometimes he was called Chevalier Louis – there was even a portrait – and sometimes he may have written for Two Worlds as 'Sirius'. Emma was founder editor of TW in 1887. Marc Demarest suggests that he was a convenient fiction, whom Emma could use to voice opinions she felt it best to keep at arm’s length publicly, even if she agreed privately.
Art Magic has, as noted, been very influential among popular occultists. And in 1877, Emma’s friend Madame Blavatsky, aided by Col Olcott, produced another revelation of occult secrets, this time called Isis Unveiled, one much less friendly to Spiritualism, but also supposedly inspired by occult teachers, this time in the East.
Emma herself published another mystery book entitled Ghostland, full of dramatic occult adventures. Could it be that this biographical work will enable us to understand the truth about Art Magic?
The American scholar Paul Johnson, author of ground-breaking books about both Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce, is working with a team on a new edition of Ghostland for the same publisher as Art Magic, and various names are in the frame as the real people whose investigations stand behind the story.
Was Emma justified? To get her message across in Art Magic, was she right to invent an author (if indeed she did so) and then to persist in the fabrication over the years? Certainly some of the other American Spiritualist leaders were not impressed. By 1878 Emma had moved to Australasia, and eventually returned to England, where she laboured for her other lasting legacy – Spiritualism as a religion, expressed in churches.
• Art Magic is published by the Typhon Press (www.thetyphonpress.com) and is available from online booksellers in paper and electronic editions.
