Angel Drummer, The.
On the Marriage Institution.
1861--1861 Monthly
Philadelphia, PA, or New York, NY.
Editor: M.G. Browne.
Succeeded by: The Metaphysician
1/1, September 6, 1861.
$1.00 a year.

Only the cover of this issue survives, marked "Specimen No.," and it is possible that that is all that was ever published. In her Metaphysical Pamphlet, A Synopsis of Metaphysics: Cause, Cure and Prevention of Disease (1871), Mrs. M.G. Brown (Martha G. Billsland Browne, 1809-1881), says she published the only issue of this in 1861 to exhibit the "great moral and religious truths, discovered through a life of deep research, relative to the marriage institution, its surroundings, etc.," but after later making her great "Metaphysical Discovery", based on the same principles as those espoused in the Angel Drummer, had moved on to promoting her revealed system of cures and her services as a Metaphysical Physician. On her, see the note under The Metaphysician.

The principle underlying both journals was that the "Marriage Institution (founded by God, but to the present day not understood by the Church or the world), has ever been, through laws which can and must be reversed, a habitation of devils. The first effectual step towards reform must begin with the marriage institution." That principle was a sexual one, although the details are now impossible to discern. On the cover of this journal and again in her 1871 pamphlet she published a graphic of a woman angel with a rather irked expression, surrounded by the sun and standing on the moon and crowned with 12 stars and beating on a drum while around her and the drum coils a serpent trying to impede drumming. "The Sun signifies LIGHT on the subject of MARRIAGE. The Serpent crawls on the Drumsticks to prevent the light." To make the point clearly, Brown then quotes Revelations 12:1. "And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars." The journal then adds other illustrations, of Jesus "bruising the serpent's head" and of a young courting couple: "Probably this gentle maid and her lover are not aware that they are in close proximity with the serpent, and the very same serpent who beguiled Eve just as she was entering into conjugal bliss. . . . The web of the great mystery of iniquity commenced when Adam and Eve were as you see this youthful pair, -- only our first parents were pure from the hands of the Trinity; the two whom we above represent have been begotten in lust, consequently not pure; but when the laws which God has eternally fixed for the protection of the married state are apprehended and put in force, then the dear children shall be born pure, and the will of God shall be done on earth as it is in heaven."

The image of the Woman Clothed with the Sun later appeared on the cover of George Chainey's and Anna Kimball's The Gnostic, and of Lois Waisbrooker's journal of that name, and as the frontispiece of Seth Pancoast's Kabbala and Jirah Dewey Buck's The Nature and Aims of Theosophy, and is commonplace in the works of Anna Bonus Kingsford, John Hamlin Dewey, and many other of the proponents of seminal retention as the path to "regeneration" and sexual reform. American Antiquarian Society.

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