Column, The.
1911--1914 Monthly, bimonthly (irregular)
Denver, CO, then London, England, and New York, NY again. Publisher: Column Publishing Co.. Editor: Julia Seaton Sears / Julia Seton, Dr. Roy Page Walton, Harry Fielding; Clifford W. Cheasley, associate editor. Succeeds: The Aquarian New Age Magazine
Corporate author: Official Organ of the New Thought Church and School
1/1, October 1911-2/12, October 1914. 32-24 pp., $1.00-$1.25 a year.

The journal was started coincidentally with the founding of Seton's New Thought Church and School in Denver. It took over the subscription list of the Aquarian New Age Magazine published in Los Angeles by Harry Gaze and others to spread word of the revelations of "Levi, the Seer and Mystic" (Levi Dowling), who died in 1911 and whose "glorified consciousness still leads on" as this journal stated, and initially continued to publish Dowling's teachings. Vol. 1, no. 9, August 1912, announced that the journal would be published from Marylebone Road in London for a month because of Seton's "vacationing" there, but when she founded a church and school there the journal began a new series in London, with renewed volume numbering, that was continued at least until mid-1913, although Seton returned to the Untied States that February. The journal was then re-started in New York with vol. 1, nos. 10-11, September-October 1913. The only notable changes to the journal on its revival in New York was the reduction to 24 pages and the addition to the masthead of two Patronesses: Her Serene Highness the Princess of Pless in Germany and Mrs. Arthur Schoellkopf of America. The last issue preserved (October 1914) speaks hopefully of the renewal of the journal the following month under a new "exoteric head" who would give Seton more time to travel and lecture, but nothing seems to have come of the proposal.

Julia Lorinda Seton Kapp Sears (December 27, 1862-April 26, 1950) was a physician, with an M.D. degree in the 1890s from Gross Medical College, which, although not of sterling quality ("it didn't even require a high school diploma for admission, had no full-time faculty members, and was financed only with student fees," and exhibited "a total absence of scientific activity") was nonetheless a bona fide medical school, a fact that distinguishes Seton from most of her New Thought contemporaries. She remained throughout her life a defender of Mary Baker Eddy and lectured and wrote on the standard New Thought topics ("thoughts are things," success, "abundance of supply," universal reform (Seton was for a time the mayor of The New Age City of Oscawana-on-Hudson, New York that taught "simple living" through "Newer Thought" and sold building lots for $150), feminist (in 1914 she sought Supreme Court review of New York's refusal to allow her to vote despite the fact that she could do so in Colorado), etc.), but stands out by her open advocacy of "occult" topics (she had begun as a student of J.C.F. Grumbine's and wrote on "Grapho-Psychology," numerology, "names and numbers," etc.) and her emphasis on the central theme of the imminent coming of the "New Civilization" in which men would awaken to all of the eight dimensions of their being by the restoration of the original cosmic sexual plan in which the race would transition from sexual generation among male and female beings to the a-sexual "emanation" of new generations.

"Jesus the Christ was born through the action of the great cosmic law of emanation. The new civilization has not remembered that the first race, called the Sacred Race, reproduced itself by this law. All of the first race was bi-sexual, and reproduction was common to all: there was neither male nor female, but just the divinely human being who contained within itself the potentiality of all life, and until the second and third era passed away man was an etherealized being with all power within a glorious body, a body so glorified that its very exhalations were like the perfume of flowers. Reproduction was a natural law of emanation from the self. As race evolution went on the hour struck for separation, not because men fell into sin, as the old race idea postulates, but simply because it was time in evolutionary law for separation to begin. The male and female qualities had evolved to where emanation from within was supplemented by a lesser law of emanation from without, and reproduction through sex separation began. At this time marked differences occurred in the physical formation and the evolution of individual men and women took the place of the dual races." Etc.

The "Tenth Fundamental" principle of New Thought for Seton's church and schools revolved around her "departments of sex education," which conveyed to students by "Esoteric Teachers and through Temple Teachings" the wisdom of sex revealed by "the Masters of the Spheres." Nothing now remains of this teaching besides generalities.

Seton began to expound this secret side of the sexual history of mankind about 1905, initially through what she called "The Modern Church" and its "School of Illuminism" or "Illuminati School" (a reference that ran her afoul of later conspiracy writers like "Inquire Within") and then through her various schools and churches that propounded the New Civilization.

"The 'New Church' . . . is redeemed out of all nations, all races, all peoples, all creeds, into the One Life that is in all . . . shown forth in non-resistance, love, service, and worship. . . . The Illuminati School is the modern school of higher psychology and mysticism, where ancient and occult wisdom is revealed. It teaches new methods of social, ethical, industrial, religious, international, and national liberty. The teaching is standardising the world and passing all thought into one great universal impulse."

The journal had as its stated purpose the filling of its readers' perceived wants. "The 'Column' magazine is for people who are desirous of advancement, who are not satisfied with finding their God through set rules and form, but while desiring God, desire their own God conception. If you are physically, mentally and morally perfect, this magazine will be of no interest to you, as you have nothing to seek, but if you want HEALTH, WEALTH, LOVE, PEACE together with the expression of these things, which your old ideas, your old ways have not given to you, then this magazine is for you as it will tell you how these things may be obtained. Its object is to remove the limitation that man has woven around himself, through his own ignorant recognition, and show him his own great possibilities. It will change his attitude toward life, by showing him there are no troubles, only as he makes and recognizes them, nor is there poverty or disease by the same law." Etc. Besides Seton's contributions, it carried articles by most of the prominent New Thought authors of the day: Grace M. Brown ("Ione"), Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Llewellyn George (of the Portland School of Astrology), L.W. Rogers (later president of the American Section of the Theosophical Society), James A. Edgerton, Walter De Voe, E.S. Romero Tedesco, W. Frederic Keeler, and others.

In later years, Seton, joined at times by her daughter Juno Belle Kapp, 1884-1984 ("Juno Jordan," the founder of "scientific" numerology), started churches and schools in Venice, California, and Washington, D.C., and elsewhere around the world. She also played a significant (though unexplained) role in the original organization of AMORC in March 1915 and earlier wrote for and advertised in Modern Miracles, of which H. Spencer Lewis was an editor and to which R.S. Clymer contributed, and lectured with Clymer in 1908 before his short-lived Hermetic Brotherhood Society in Los Angeles. In the 1920s she was a friend of Marc Edmund Jones and wrote some of what became his Sabian ceremonies.

Seton (or at least her then-husband Franklin Warren Sears) was no stranger to the commercial side of the New Thought. The Sears Investment Company of Boston in the period 1905-1910 not only published several of Seton's books but also was in the business of touting its oil fields in Colorado and its ownership of "the biggest invention of the age." "Burn Air. . . . It will become a bigger money maker than even Bell Telephone has been. Millions in It." After their divorce in 1914, F.W. Sears became a proponent of New Thought psychology in his own right. LOC; BL.

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