Book Review: Essays on Women in Western Esotericism – I
The scholarly focus on women in Western Esotericism has, as editor Amy Hale points out in her introduction to Essays on Women in Western Esotericism: Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses (Palgrave MacMillan, 2021), often been framed as marginal or secondary to studies of male occultists. This new book then is a welcome and much-needed corrective to that lacuna. Divided into four sections, the contributions cover women both well-known – Dion Fortune, Pamela Colman Smith, Florence Farr, and Doreen Valiente, to the more obscure (at least to me), such as Eleanor Kirk and Colette Aboulker-Muscat.
At the same time that this volume celebrates the lives and achievements of its subjects, it also complicates them, showing that although many of the women profiled herein were critical of the way women were treated, their esoteric ideas did not necessarily challenge the majoritarian gender regimes of their respective periods, and they not infrequently produced esoteric representations of racial categorizations and exclusions. This is, in itself brings into focus what I believe to be an important point. So-called occult laws and principles are all too often taken as ahistorical and universal truths by practitioners, rather than products or reifications of cultural discourse. Highlighting, for example, the esotericized racial schemas of Dion Fortune, for example, can hopefully foster a more critical approach to esoteric ‘laws’ amongst both practitioners and scholars alike.
In order to give each of the chapters the attention it deserves, I’ve divided this review into two posts.
The first section of Essays on Women – Race, Place, and Othering – comprises chapters on Frances Swiney, Pamela Coleman Smith, and Dion Fortune.
First up is Jessica A. Albrecht’s Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney: Imperial Feminism and Eugenics in Theosophical Evolutionist Thought. I’ve been interested in Frances Swiney ever since I encountered her ideas through Joy Dixon’s Divine Feminine (a brief review here), in particular, her braiding of concepts of race, eugenics, gender, and spirituality (some related discussion here). Swiney has received comparatively little attention from scholars of Theosophy and Western Esotericism, so this essay is particularly welcome. Jessica A. Albrecht gives a thorough overview of Swiney’s life and works, and her ‘League of Isis’ movement, paying particular attention to her key notion that Feminism – the end of women’s material and spiritual subjugation to men – was inevitable in terms of humankind’s evolutionary progress. Swiney’s entanglement with the Eugenics movement is also noteworthy, as the intersection between esotericism and racial purity movements deserves more attention (some related discussion here). Albrecht also explores Swiney’s writings aimed at Indian women and points out that, like others involved in Theosophy, she was both anti-Christian and anti-Empire.
In Chapter three, Thea Wirsching’s The Myth of Pamela Colman Smith’s Blackness: Ethnic Impersonation in the Modern Esoteric Mileu aims, as Wirsching writes, to “deconstruct the now-prevalent myth that the illustrator of the iconic Rider-Waite Tarot, Pamela Colman Smith, was bi-racial and Black-identified.” Wirsching poses the question of “why Smith, in particular, has become a lightning rod for speculation about a secret racial identity” and also how Smith represented herself as an Afro-Jamaican “Mammy” in order to draw on discourses of modern primitivism and exoticism. In a careful examination of Smith’s career in the wider context of the period’s attitudes and laws concerning racial separation, Wirsching forcefully makes the case that “Pamela Colman Smith was welcomed into elite white spaces to perform a Black character because she was a white society woman who could offer mediated, sanitized, and above all non-threatening picture of Blackness.” Wirsching stresses that what concerns her is that by identifying Smith as Black, scholars have perpetuated a representation of Blackness as tragic-romantic, ignoring its very real material effects. Issues such as these, Wirsching points out, must be directly confronted if we want to speak honestly about the white supremacism present in Western esotericism.
Chapter Four sees Diana Brown tackling Dion Fortune’s views on Yoga, in “Eastern Methods”/”Western Bodies”: Dion Fortune’s Shifting Positions on Yoga, 1929-1940. Again, this is another subject that interests me, and as Diana Brown points out, there is relatively little critical scholarship on Dion Fortune – and much of what there is in my view, is marred by what Thea Wirsching referred to as the “gloss of mystery and romance that so often falls on influential esotericists”. Brown reviews a selection of Fortune’s writings between the period 1929-1940 to track her changing views on the subject of Yoga and its suitability for western practitioners. Brown explores how Fortune’s view of Yoga as unsuitable for Westerners is, in her 1929 essay, framed by both popular orientalist narratives and theories of racial difference as found in Robert Knox’s 1850 The Races of Man (discussed briefly here) reinforced by a blend of esoteric notions of the body and biological determinism. Fortune moves away from this position in her later work to a point where she is actually advocating that western practitioners incorporate both Hatha Yoga and Tantra into their practices. This is interesting in itself, given the general antipathy expressed by other esotericists of the period concerning Hatha Yoga. Even Crowley is somewhat dismissive of the notion that hatha yoga produces magical powers (some discussion here). For anyone interested in the ways that Yoga (and Tantra) were incorporated into Western Esotericism, this is an important essay, and I will probably return to it in more depth in a separate post.
Part Two – Locating the Feminine – opens with Michele Ozli’s paper, The Devil Wears Pink: The Representation and Role of Woman in the Occultism of Maria de Naglowska. The multi-talented Maria de Naglowska (1883-1936) – was at times a poetess, journalist, translator, editor and lecturer, a habitue of the Italian avant-garde and esoteric milieus. Ozli characterizes Naglowska’s esotericism as a kind of ‘satanic feminism’, and explores Naglowska’s perspective on magical sexuality, her answer to the issue of women’s role in society, and the esoteric groups that she later established. For Naglowska, although women appear to be passive to their male partner, they represent the only access to a spiritual dimension. Moreover, in order to qualify as priestesses, women must avoid achieving climax or becoming pregnant – Naglowska viewed the experience of pleasure and motherhood as emblematic of the classification of woman within society. She believed these roles could be transcended during acts of sexual magic, which nontheless “spiritually fertilized” the male.
In The Power of Beauty: Eleanor Kirk’s Feminine Esotericism, Christa Shusko profiles the writings of American journalist and author Eleanor Kirk (1833-1908). Shusko explores Kirk’s blending of New Thought and Mental Science with very practical concerns for women’s health, as found in her advice on fashion and beauty which aimed at not only spiritual but also physical improvement for her readers, coming to see the cultivation of beauty as essential to life. Eleanor Kirk sounds like an amazing character, and I hope this essay will inspire further exploration of her ideas.
The final paper in this section, by Jay Johnston, is Ithell Colquhoun’s Other-than-Human Art. Here, Johnson takes an ‘Esoteric Aesthetics’ lens to Colquhoun’s artistic productions – a form of engagement that prioritises the intersubjective, other-worldly agencies, and alternative modes of perception. This approach, says Johnston, can accommodate Colquhoun’s belief that colours were spiritual forces or entities, and that both the production and viewing of artwork effected magic. From this perspective, Johnston explores Colquhoun’s watercolour landscapes; the ‘fluid epistemologies’ implicit in her essay “Children of the Mantic Stain” and its relations to automatisms, the generation of spirit entities, and modes of divinatory perception. I found this essay to be difficult at times, but Johnston does open up new avenues for appreciating spiritual art such as Colquhoun’s.
In the next post, I will review the essays comprising Parts Three and Four of Essays on Women in Western Esotericism.
