Gnostic, The.
Devoted to Theosophy, Spiritualism, Occult Phenomena and the Cultivation of the Higher Life / A Monthly Journal devoted to Spiritual Science and Universal Theosophy / Organ of the Delsarte Conservatory of Esthetic Gymnastics and Gnostic School of Psychic and Physical Culture.
Learn to know all and keep thyself unknown / Intuition is the only faculty in man through which Divine Revelation comes, or ever has come.--W.F. Evans. Intuition is the seed of the tree of life, and the various attributes of the mind, which lead to gifts of the Spirit, are its trunk and branches.--F.B. Dowd.
Intuition, being the knowledge which descends into the soul from above, excels any that can be attained by the mere exercise of the intellect.--The Perfect Way
1885--1888 Monthly, irregular
Oakland, then San Francisco, CA.
Publisher: George Chainey and Anna Kimball; Gnostic Publishing Company.
Editor: George Chainey and Anna Kimball; later with M.E. Cramer (business manager) and W.J. Colville (editor and part proprietor).
Succeeded by: International Magazine of Christian Science (Mary Plunkett), took over unexpired subscriptions
Corporate author: Mystic Lodge, Gnostic Schools and Societies of Psychic and Physical Culture; edited by its Presidents / Organ of the Delsarte Conservatory of Esthetic Gymnastics and Gnostic School of Psychic and Physical Culture
1/1, July 1885-1/11 (or 2/13), July 1888. 24 - "no less than 40 pp.," $1.00-$2.00 a year, 10 cents an issue.

This was a very important journal for the history of the emergence of the New Thought occult spiritualist Theosophical amalgam that prevailed from the late 1880s until after the First World War. It brought together for the first time many of the influential figures of a developing consensus that represented, not an organized movement with hard and fast doctrines and beliefs, but rather what might be thought of as the "Western," "Christian" reaction to the Theosophical Society's trend at the time toward "esoteric Buddhism," with its denial of post-mortem communication with the dead, individual immortality of the soul, and practical (usually sexual) means to attain spiritual and psychic development during this life. This reaction is associated generally with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (H.B. of L.) and associated movements, and with people like Freeman B. Dowd; Anna Bonus Kingsford and Edward Maitland; Maria Martegui (Marie Sinclair), the Countess of Caithness and Duchesse de Pomar and her son, and her journals L'Etoile and L'Aurore du Jour Nouveau; J.H. Dewey; Josephine W. Cables and her The Occult Word; Parsival Braun and Christliche Theosophie; Hiram E. Butler and The Esoteric; Lawrence Oliphant-- all of whom contributed to or advertised in this journal, as did others who became later became prominent in New Thought, like Malinda E. Cramer (publisher of Harmony and founder of Divine Science), who was the business manager of the journal, and W.J. Colville, who was an editor of the journal and partial owner.

The journal was started in California, in 1885, by the mavericks George Chainey and Anna Kimball. Chainey (1851-1935) was one of the radical ex-clerics that the period spawned. He had been born in England and then become an Indiana Methodist exhorter, and then Universalist minister until his parishioners barred him by court order from entering his church because he was preaching "free religion." He promptly revealed himself as a materialist and free thinker and took to the secularist lecture circuits, attacking clericalism and defending, notably, Walt Whitman (the proposed Boston ban against whose "Leaves of Grass" was defeated when Chainey read his "To a Common Prostitute" from his pulpit and then published the sermon in his free thought journal, This World). Chainey published several excerpts from Whitman's works in this journal and also a letter from Whitman. In September 1884, Chainey attended the eighth annual convention of the National Liberal League (of which he was vice-president and Ida C. Craddock was to become the secretary) held on the grounds of the Cassadaga Lake Free Association--i.e., the Lily Dale spiritualist camp--just after the spiritualists had folded their tents for the season. He arrived early and met Kimball and was converted wholeheartedly to spiritualism. Ever one to proclaim his beliefs, Chainey took the occasion of his speech at the opening the Liberal League's meeting to announce: "When I came to this camp I no more expected to become a Spiritualist than I did to jump over the moon. If there is any such thing as trusting one's senses, I know that our departed friends are all around us; that the living ears that listen to me to-day are but few in comparison to the great cloud of unseen witnesses that hover about us. . . . I would not part with that experience for all the gold of earth. . . . I find in it a new gospel, justifying the wildest hopes and brightest dreams. Death is no more to us."

In an era that abounded in eccentrics, Anna Kimball stands alone. She was born Anna Farnham Kimball in upstate New York in 1827, the niece of the early Mormon leader, Elder Heber C. Kimball, and died near San Diego, California (the refuge of superannuated mages) on February 21, 1920, at 92, after a notably checkered life. Her studio portrait was tipped into the November 1885 issue of journal. She was, as the newspapers gloated, "a woman with a history." She spent the 1870s advertising herself as an "electric physician" ("Electrical and Magnetic Treatment Given When Desired"), "Clairvoyant, Inspirational Healing Medium," and a "Clairvoyant Magnetiser, Controlled by an ancient SPIRITUAL-HEALER." She was also a practitioner of psychometry, the ability to perceive the history of an animate or inanimate object from the subtle emanations and vibrations given off. Her most notable reading, done from a fragment of a meteorite given her by William Denton (the inventor of the term psychometry), tells the story of Sideros, a now-destroyed planet whose inhabitants communed freely with the spirits and, more interestingly, had sexual intercourse with the spirits and bore their children.

"They consorted with spirits who had material bodies and sustained all the relations of life. I see some women who have spirit companions and men who have spirit wives. They live in two worlds at the same time, for they can be visible or invisible at pleasure. Children are born of these people of the highest type; they are almost, yes, even more refined in some instance than spirit children." (Religio-Philosophical Journal, November 20, 1880)

Kimball's mind, as a critic noted, "was absorbed in sexual matters" and its tendency lay "in the direction of outre sexuality"--characteristics that might have been expected in an old free-lover follower of Victoria Woodhull, who had advocated the same ideas in her The Elixir of Life: or, Why Do We Die? (1873). For her, the state of development of the inhabitants of Sideros was that formerly obtaining on earth and possibly coming again in the new age--when humans, like the Siderians, would again enjoy sexual intercourse with the spirits.

While these pursuits may have supplied her daily bread and butter, Kimball's real claim to fame lay in her ability to mediate the Star Circle and the spirit of Mary Queen of Scots. Through Kimball, the unfortunate queen revealed that when spiritualism began an international group of spirits called the "Star Circle" because they were "organized in the form of a star" had decided to develop "a strong battery of power" in England that would spread through the world, making the Anglo-Saxons the race to dominate the new world order. In November 1875, her spirits advised her to leave for England to carry out their wishes, leaving her New York circle a six-pointed star, the symbol of the Star Circle, to remember her by. In Europe she pursued psychometry and the "healing art" and the production of spirit portraits of Mary Stuart and made a significant conquest in Marie Sinclair (Maria Martegui), Duchesse de Pomar and Countess of Caithness, who was in the interesting position of both communicating with Mary's spirit and of believing she was her reincarnation. Regular excerpts both from her and from her son, the Duc de Pomar, regularly appeared in the journal.

Chainey and Kimball hit it off, although he was 33 and married with children (and un-divorced) and she 57, and promptly joined the Rochester branch of the Theosophical Society led by Josephine W. Cables. They immediately attempted to start a Hermetic Lodge of the Theosophical Society in Boston in 1884 (probably in imitation of Anna Kingsford's organization of the same name in London), but permission was denied and the next year they were expelled from the Society "for cause" (probably Anna's reputation), and they headed West, visiting Anna's Mormon relatives in Utah on the way. Chainey called her "the Mother of my Soul" and the pair finally married in 1886, at least her third marriage. (The Religio-Philosophical Journal, May 14, 1887, noted in a nicely snide fashion that Chainey "embraced in consecutive order Methodism, Unitarianisn, Materialism, Agnosticism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Metaphysical Healing, and Anna Kimball.")

They started this journal, first in Oakland and then in San Francisco. The epigrams below its masthead were by F.W. Evans (the first to attempt to rationalize New Thought), Anna Bonus Kingsford, and Freeman B. Dowd. Initially the journal was to be simply a forum for their lectures and correspondence, but as they attracted more notice it was promoted as the organ for a Delsartre Conservatory of Esthetic Gymnastics and for the Gnostic School of Psychic and Physical Culture. The Gnostic School was modeled on the original Theosophical Society, with initiations and degrees, and had as its goals the "recovery and promulgation of the Esoteric Truths of all religions," "the culture of the Subjective or Soul Faculties" (with breathing practices and physical exercises), and "the study of Occult Science." The two organizations seem never to have been properly organized and their work was soon combined. Chainey taught "Esthetic Physical Culture, Physiology and voice Culture, Elocution, Oratorical and Dramatic Action according to the Delsartre Method," with courses in psychic and physical culture and lessons in Voice and Dramatic Culture for $5.00 a week (morning classes) or $3.00 a week (evening classes). For $2.00, Kimball would provide a personal psychometric reading. The written lessons from the Conservatory/School were regularly published in the journal.

The journal featured regular offerings by Chainey and Kimball, notably Kimball's "Leaves from My Life" which recounts her being a somnambulist from her earliest recollection and larking about with her invisible companion, a "nut-brown, forest maid, ‘Memonita' or ‘Silver Light.'" It also carried contributions from Helen Wilmans, Ella Wheeler (before she married Wilcox), the Countess of Caithness and the Duc de Pomar, Anna Kingsford, Edward Maitland, Lawrence Oliphant, Mabel Collins (whose Idyl of the White Lotus was serialized), J.H. Dewey, Thomas Lake Harris, Lizzie Doten, Louise A. Off (who published the Theosophical New Californian a few years later), Louise Chandler Moulton (a member of the H.B. of L.), et al. It also carried a curious letter about the "Luxors," dated June 6, 1885, from T.D. Pease (of Springfield, Massachusetts, who is probably the medium noted in Facts in 1883 for receiving spirit messages in "telegraphic characters"):

"I suppose you are aware of the meeting in Paris yesterday. We had a friend come in last eve and a representative of the Luxors came to us and made himself known as did also our friend J.C. Street. He came into the rooms in a silvery cloud, and then took on shape and form, and our friend, who had met him, recognized him at once and he bowed in recognition. He gave us no message, but the other party did -- I only speak of this that you may know we are alive."

The branch of the Theosophical Society that Chainey and Kimball had joined was that presided over by Josephine W. Cables in Rochester, New York, a pivotal figure in the Christian Theosophy movement and a regular correspondent with Caithness and Anna Kingsford. Cables was a Christian spiritualist who had joined the Theosophical Society in 1882, when such beliefs were still acceptable, but she increasingly turned away from the society as it embraced "esoteric Buddhism" and rejected Christianity, individual immortality and the promise of personal occult and spiritual development during this life. She was responsible for initiating into the Theosophical Society Jonathan Stickney McDonald, S.C. Gould, Hiram E. Butler, Freeman B. Dowd and many others. Cables was also, from about 1883, a member of the H.B. of L. and head of its Eastern Section, and was responsible for admitting Gould and McDonald (who later formed the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light), as well as Dowd and Butler to that fraternity--but not Kimball and Chainey, whose applications to the H.B. of L. were rejected, undoubtedly because a majority of the American Board of Control of the Theosophical society that had expelled them were also members of the H.B. of L. The journal, nonetheless, carried advertisements for the Occult Magazine, Cables's The Occult World, T.M. Johnson's The Platonist, Butler's The Esoteric, and Gould's Notes and Queries, and also printed a curious note from the editor of the Occult Magazine (Peter Davidson) seeking a refuge for himself and family in Monterey, Fresno or Tulare, California and offering to give the town selected his vast library of occult books.

Most notable of the contributors to the journal was Freeman B. Dowd, the long-time student of Paschal Beverly Randolph's and a member of the H.B. of L. under Cables, an excerpt from whose writings was an epigram of the journal. From the beginning and regularly through its existence the journal carried his "Rosicrucian Sermons," which emphasized the role of the sexual side of human nature in spiritual and occult development. A passage from "Rosicrucian Sermon, No. 4," (July 1888), is illustrative:

"Sexual emotions are the strongest, the highest and the deepest a human being can feel, and yet they are the most transient and fleeting. But transient as they may be, ‘tis then that God draws near to us and gives us a glimpse of creative power, and the ecstatic bliss of its possession, for indeed we are possessed at such times."

The ambivalent and protean role of sex in the journal and as the engine of spiritual and psychical development in New Thought generally is illustrated by its cover, which showed the image of a woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, a star on her forehead with others over her head, her arm pointing to a brilliant star in the heavens and a waiting serpent lurking below her foot and the moon. No explanation of the symbol was given or necessary: The same image had provided the frontispiece for Seth Pancoast's The Kabbala; Or, the True Science of Light (1883), Jirah Dewey Buck's The Nature and Aims of Theosophy (1889) and of many other contemporary works, and went on to give the title to Lois Waisbrooker's Clothed with the Sun (1900), Anna Kingford's The Mother: The Woman Clothed with the Sun (1885), etc. Everyone knew the story of the Fall in the first and second chapters of Genesis: the un-sexual or bi-sexual Adam (with Eve taken from Adam's side) and the pair's original freedom from shame; the garden eastward of Eden; the serpent's assurance that eating of the tree would open their eyes and make the pair like gods, knowing good and evil; the sin; God's curse of the serpent, placing enmity between it and the woman and her seed who would crush its head; the condemnation of Eve to desire her husband and bring forth children in sorrow and of Adam to labor and death; the expulsion from Eden and placing of a flaming sword "to keep the way to the tree of life." The counterpart to this story of the Fall, known to all who were interested, was Revelations, chapters 12 and 22, which told the story of "a great sign in heaven; a woman clothed with the Sun, and the Moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars" and the casting out of the old serpent, and the river of the waters of life on the banks of which was the tree of life, "which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations." The lesson was obvious: Death came from the Fall, and life and restoration of Eden from the reversal of the Fall and the restoration of the original bi-sexual monad and the overcoming of woman's monthly cycles. Thomas Lake Harris, often mentioned in this journal, epitomized this understanding: "We think that generations must cease till the sons and daughters of God are prepared for the higher generation, by evolution into structural, bi-sexual completeness, above the plane of sin, of disease, of natural morality. . . . The doctrine of the Divine-human Two-in-One, in whose individual and social likeness, in whose spiritual and physical likeness, we seek to be re-born, is the pivot of our faith and the directive force of our life. The ages wait for the Manifestation of the sons of God." The melange of ideas encompassed by the image of the Woman Clothed with the Sun was broad enough to encompass both Kimball's (and Waisbrooker's) idea of sexual intercourse spirits and Chainey's vaguer concept of the restoration of a primordial androgynous "state devoid of any element of physical love." New Thought would ring out the changes and consequences of these ideas for the next 40 years.

In November 1885, after four issues of the journal, Chainey and Kimball must have realized that that their hopes for success in San Francisco were dim, and, like so many spiritualists and later New Thought exponents, decamped for greener pastures in Australia and New Zealand, leaving the journal and the Gnostic Society in the hands of Malinda E. Cramer and her husband, Frank. The Chaineys made the usual lecture tours of the Antipodes and started in Melbourne the Melbourne Gnostic Society that was to become the fourth branch of the Theosophical Society there (announcing themselves as American Theosophists) and then returned to the United States in January 1888. Number 6 of the journal reappeared in December 1887, before their return, under the care of Malinda Cramer. Cramer, one of the most important and influential of the early New Thought teachers (she taught Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Nona Brooks, et al.) was the corresponding secretary and business manager of the journal and in the absence of the Chaineys had lectured in San Francisco on "Divine Science," a term that Kimball had used in the journal as early as 1885 to describe J.R. Buchanan's psychometry, and the name Cramer applied to her own version of New Thought. By January 1888, the Chaineys were advertising in the journal for their version of "The Divine Science," "how to free the Intuitions, the Psychometric Faculty latent in all souls. How to heal all disease by Mental Therapeutics combined with Physical Culture," with an address in care of Cramer, and also announcing meetings of the Gnostic Society at the same address. In May 1888, Cramer founded the Divine Science Home School in San Francisco, and in October 1888, after this journal had ceased in July, she and her husband started Harmony, A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Divine Science.

During its first year, Harmony featured Dowd's novelette, "The New Order: An Occult Story," (written under the pseudonym "A Rosicrucian") which marked once and for all his rejection of sex for magical purposes and his adoption of New Thought and mind cure as the paradigms for the new spirituality. "It has been known to the author for some time past, that a new order of teachers was becoming manifest on this planet; an order whose teachings and methods would be different from those of the Brethren of Eulis or any other school of Occultism; whose teachings would surpass those of past orders, and in surpassing explain them; for the time is at hand when this may be done with wisdom." Dowd used the terms "Old Rosicrucians" and "New Rosicrucians" to describe the divergence, noting that the secrets of the former had been known to the "phallicists" but that the "New Order" had "discarded old practices, except in a few instances, as a means to an end." The new "Metaphysicians," he opined, "are practicing openly what students of occultism are doing in secret" -- a phrase that marks the key to much of New Thought.

In Australia, the Chaneys had encountered William James Colville (1856 or, as he claimed in order to establish his precociousness, 1862-1917), who became an editor and proprietor of the revived journal. For three days in June 1884 he had acted as a medium for Caithness' circle in Paris, and published the resulting revelations as The Coming of the Kingdom of God (1884), appending "an impromptu poem ‘The Star Circle,'" dedicated to Kimball's Star Circle. He contributed to the journal a regular column of answers to questions posed by readers.

Despite the help of Colville and Cramer, the journal was obviously in desperate straits. Its last issues were increasingly made up of "filler," long excerpts from the Duc de Pomar, Lawrence Oliphant, and Mabel Collins. After the first issue of the journal was published, Chainey had claimed to have almost a thousand subscribers. This was certainly an exaggeration and probably represents an initial solicitation mailing since the journal never prospered. After ten issues the it decided to combine the May and June 1888 issues and then skipped them altogether, promising to add the skipped issues to subscriptions, and published a final issue numbered variously vol. 1, no. 11 or vol. 2, no. 13. Elaborate plans were published for a volume 2, with lessons, occult stories, questions answered by Colville, Sacred Heart Papers by the Chaineys, etc., but nothing came of them. In the first issue of her magazine Harmony in October 1888, Malinda Cramer announced that Chainey had left for New York "for the purpose of placing the Gnostic on a permanent basis" by raising $10,000 for a Gnostic Publishing Company, but the effort was in vain and the next year she noted that the journal had finally ceased to exist and that unexpired subscriptions would be made up by issues of Mary Plunkett's International Magazine of Christian Science.

Strife between Chainey and Kimball may have contributed to the demise of the journal. Chainey was said to have abandoned Kimball in Oakland in 1888, but she continued to style herself "Anna Kimball Chainey" for years and only formally divorced him in Los Angeles in 1903. She appeared next in Minneapolis and then New York City at the end of 1888, where she started a "School of Truth" on 12th Street and offered to send "send Written Lessons in the Christ Method of Healing, and give treatment to absent patients," and in ensuing years played out variants of this theme throughout the country, increasingly gravitating toward southern California.

Chainey also took to the road again, first to New York in a futile effort to raise money for the journal, and then abroad, to Jerusalem, Paris and London. In London, from March to December 1890 he published, under the pseudonym "Leo Michael," Psyche: A Journal of Mystical Interpretation, with Edward Maitland. The journal marked Chainey's graduation from the tutelage of Anna Kimball to a seer and Christian visionary in his own right. The first issue carried his "Spiritual Autobiography," detailing his path from Methodism and Unitarianism to secularism and then to mystical vision under the guidance of Joan of Arc. It serialized in four parts "The Flower of France: An Esoteric Interpretation of the Life and Mission of Joan of Arc," that Chainey published the year before in Caithness' journal L'Aurore and then as a pamphlet in Paris with a preface by Caithness. In it he recounted his first revealing vision of Joan of Arc in Boston in 1888 and a more powerful vision the next year at the birthplace of Joan of Arc in which he was transported in a dream to a library room of a great palace which contained many rare and valuable books which contained "the Secret Doctrine of the Hebrew Sacred Writings" and the "Divine Mysteries of Life and Death." that he was to peddle for the remainder of his life. He then formed the Order of the Sacred Heart, which taught the role of the solar plexus in spiritual and psychic development. In 1893 a journal reported that "'coffee-colored George' Chainey from Boston, who, in the company of some women, has set out to find the lost ten tribes of Israel in a land not to be found on any map. We think that is the very land in which to look for them." His mental state in doing this venture can only be guessed at, but Harmony in 1900 noted that he had been retired in a "state of mental illumination and clairvoyance" and had written 30 volumes of Bible revelation while publishing The Interpreter in Chicago. He also started the Mahanaim School of Interpretation there, offering an array of lessons and and then moved to California. In 1927 he published from Long Beach, California, the World Liberator, expounding lengthily on a universal religion built around the Mahabarata, Zoroaster, Gandhi, Dharmapala, Rabindrinath Tagore, Spinoza, and the like, and his own visionary experiences. Brown University; University of California, Berkeley; University of Virginia; Valdosta State University (complete run with tables of contents).

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