From Inner Light Journal Autumn Equinox, 2007 by Gareth Knight, author and occultist
Anna Kingsford is one of the most fascinating and charismatic of all characters who have graced the western esoteric tradition. She was the inspiration of many of her contemporaries, including MacGregor Mathers, who acknowledged as much in his major work "The Kabbalah Unveiled". Indeed it is possible that the famous Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn would never have come to birth if she had lived, but would have been subsumed within the Hermetic Society that she founded in 1884, only for it to wither away after her tragically premature death at the age of 41 in 1888.
Today she is remembered more for her work in the field of animal rights, particularly anti-vivisection and vegetarianism of which she was a passionate advocate. Yet her exposition of esoteric philosophy, The Perfect Way, and the record of her illuminations, posthumously published as Clothed with the Sun, are both classic Hermetic texts.
To write the story of Anna Kingsford might seem a relatively straightforward task as it already seems to have been done, and at great length, in 1896, by her esoteric colleague Henry Maitland in his Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary and Work. Thus at first sight it seems no more than a question of editing Maitland's two weighty volumes of late Victorian prolixity down to reasonable and relevant proportions. So it appeared to Alan Pert at first. And indeed to me.
Alas, things are not so simple. For the question remains how far Maitland can be trusted in all he has said. This is not a question that is easy to answer with any accuracy, for after writing his great tome, by accident or intention Maitland destroyed all her diaries and correspondence.
In his own approach to the problem Alan Pert comes down pretty heavily against Maitland , and not without reason. Whether he has come down too heavily or not enough is likely to be a matter of discussion.
As far as Alan Pert is concerned, Maitland's unreliability is self evident from the way that, despite his apparent adulation of Anna Kingsford, Maitland subtly does her down in ways that are at odds with her perceived character. A principal example of this being the allegation that in her horror at the actions of contemporary vivisectionists, including Louis Pasteur, she was driven to try to kill them by occult means. To Alan Pert such a suggestion, given her lofty character and high principles, is self evidently ludicrous. But to support this intuitive assessment we needs must have some kind of supporting evidence, either in the witness of contemporaries who knew them both, or, in the lack of manuscript material by Anna Kingsford, other writings by Henry Maitland.
The latter, it has to be said, are not an easy read, but I can claim to be one of the few, along with Alan Pert, to have attempted the task, for I did at one time also contemplate writing an up-date on Anna Kingsford, and as preparation read most of Maitland's literary work, along with books that he said had influenced him. It was a wild and woolly scenic ride through early Victorian romanticism, and had its fascinating and invigorating moments, including Emerson, Lord Lytton, Southey's "Thalaba the Destroyer", Charlotte Bronte, the now obscure Abraham Tucker and the now unheard of Philip James Bailey, whose "Festus" is a vast cosmological drama in verse.
Maitland cites these in The Pilgrim and the Shrine, his promising first novel which is largely autobiographical, containing an account of his youthful adventures in the West Indies, the 1849 California gold rush, and thence via the Pacific Islands to Australia to seek a fortune in the gold mines of New South Wales. However, once arrived in the antipodes the novel begins to lose its pace and grip and devolves into rather tedious metaphysical discussion, a trend to which he had been intermittently prone in earlier pages.
His next novel By-and-By: an Historical Romance of the Future continued this trend, although as a utopian metaphysical science fiction novel it could have been a great idea at the time, even foreshadowing Jules Verne, it suffers from a cloying sentimentality, and his view of womanhood is quite bizarre, a kind of submissive and not very bright angel being his ideal of femininity. It is thus surprising that he claims it was Anna Kingsford's admiration for this novel that caused her to get in touch with him, for it contains material very much at odds with her feminist principles. Indeed he admits to her saying that at first reading she had flung it down in disgust - but this apparently because she saw elements of herself in his heroine! Make of this what we may.
It seems that his publishers encouraged him to abandon fiction after this but his non-fictional work England and Islam becomes at times quite off the wall. It is a political diatribe that began as a letter to "The Times" but developed into a lengthy volume, dashed off in six weeks, that he felt had almost divine authority, because parts of it were written under spirit guidance, his fingers at times being controlled as he worked at the typewriter.
That his publishers accepted it is surprising, although it may have seemed topically opportune, as dealing with current concern over possible war with either Russia or Turkey. That his family considered it as grounds for having him mentally certified seems not unreasonable, although he considered this to have been sectarian bigotry on their part that was fortunately thwarted by psychic intervention.
He later confessed that the work had probably destroyed his literary reputation, such as it then was, but having met Anna Kingsford he now brought out The Soul and How it Found Me, a book recording the mystical effect of their association upon his inner life. It found few readers outside of the spiritualist movement and on strong representations from Anna Kingsford was withdrawn from publication. Although she was not mentioned by name in it, it was evidently doing her reputation no good at all. Maitland bought in all the remaining stock and had it destroyed, but vowed to use the material in his eventual book on Anna Kingsford.
Over this, of course, the great biography, she was no longer able to lay a restraining hand, and it is larded with detailed accounts of his visits to mediums along with personal psychic experiences, along with the assumption that he and Anna were co-founders of a new religious dispensation - buttressed by his conviction of having been no less than St. John in a previous life, the beloved disciple of Jesus and author of Revelations.
Indeed the conclusion seems to be that Edward Maitland, sincere and harmless old buffer though he may have appeared to be, was in serious need of help and something of a menace to the reputation of Anna Kingsford. Should there be any doubt in the matter it seems sufficient to study just the last chapter of his life of Anna Kingsford, entitled "Post Mortem", and in particular the very last paragraph of the book:
While writing I was suddenly seized with a strong desire to exchange supposition for positive assurance in regard to my identity with John; and looking up from my writing, I mentally put the question as to my own inmost self, being, as was my invariable wont, absolutely calm and collected, and without the smallest expectation of a response: "May I be quite certain of the reality of my seeming recollections of having been John the Evangelist and Seer, and that I am truly a reincarnation of the soul that was in him?" The response to this question came with an instantaneousness and force which seemed to imply that the question had been prompted and expected in order to make answer to it, there being no moment of delay to suggest the need of the arrival of anyone to answer it. It was electric for its swiftness, vividness, and intensity, and seemed to radiate from the very centre of my system to its farthest extremities, and it consisted in a mighty "YES," which appealed to every sense at once, being alike heard, seen, and felt. And when the sensation had passed away and the tones of the utterance had ceased to vibrate, I found myself perfectly content and satisfied, and undesirous of further assurance. The answer seemed to be intended as a final and conclusive reply, to seek beyond which would be to exhibit a distrust wholly without excuse in view of the history, relations, experiences, and achievements in which it had been given me to bear part.
In this is encapsulated much of the self deception and grandiose self regard of which Edward Maitland seemed capable, and which begs one to question how much of his previous 884 pages can be regarded as reliable, to say nothing of his editing of her Illuminations. The tragedy is that his appropriation of the legacy of Anna Kingsford has tended to make her an object of neglect and misunderstanding, and is perhaps why Anna Kingsford is remembered more for her vegetarian and anti-vivisection causes than for the remarkable seer that she undoubtedly was.
It is to be hoped that Alan Pert's serviceable and competent biography will do something to put this right, having brought new material to light, including the witness of close contemporaries such as Anna Kingsford's friend Florence Miller. Regrettably, perhaps too much emphasis has had to be taken up in the book (as in this review) with Edward Maitland`s shortcomings rather than Anna Kingsford's remarkable qualities.
"Red Cactus" was an emblem said, in one of her Illuminations, appropriately to represent her, the cactus being an organism that causes the desert to bloom. The high regard in which she was held by her contemporaries seems witness to this. Alan Pert has performed a useful service in providing us with a succinct and accurate record of her outer life. It perhaps remains for the gist of her inner life and esoteric teaching to be presented in systematic and modern terms, for the importance of much that she taught and realised has barely been appreciated even today.