Hamsa.
An Organ of Wholeness Dedicated to the Upholding of the Ideal of Harmonic Cooperation and Synthesis and to the Establishment of a Living Civilization Animated by the Conscious Realization in every Individual of the Living God.
1932--1934 9 issues a year, then monthly
Brookline, MA.
1/1, 1932-1934. 16 pp., $2.00 a year.

"Hamsa" (swan in Sanskrit) is one of those all-purpose symbols in India, standing for purity, for the breath, and for the flight of the soul from the cycle of samsara to liberation. For Rudhyar (born Daniel Chenneviere in Paris, 1895-1985), the father of "Karmic Astrology" (the attempt to combine astrology with Theosophical ideas on races and cycles), the term also referred to the new cosmic cycle and the select pioneers (the "seed men") chosen to initiate it: "With the year 1931 a new period of world-activity opened. This period forces upon those who by spiritual birthright belong to the pioneer-group which can be symbolized by the term HAMSA a new responsibility. The forty years that will follow (the number is symbolical rather than chronological, though it may be both) will correspond to the forty weeks of embryonic development. Humanity has become God-pregnant. The task of spiritual and cosmic motherhood is upon those who have felt and will feel in an increasing manner the Presence of the Living God upon them. Out of their inner substance is the shrine of the new divinity of Man to be built." Hamsa, then, was "not a magazine in the common sense of the term. It is the organ of an Ideal, and an outpost of a vast Cosmic Consciousness whose time for manifestation on earth is coming. That the small organ of an ideal may grow into an organism in whom the Living Idea may dwell and from which it may radiate, we ask your cooperation" -- cooperation expressed the the readers’ forming a "clear mental picture of men or women reading these pages and thinking with us."

Rudhyar was a friend of Marc Edmund Jones, from whose writings the journal frequently carried excerpts and on whose "Sabian Assembly" Rudhyar patterned the loose organization of his select "seed men," who were to be "ubiquitous, plastic, self-regenerating, unbound by dogma, rooted only in Life and Purpose, universalistic; -- a moving Force of Free Men and Free Women who dare to be gods and to create a New World."

The journal was largely written by Rudhyar but carried excerpts from Walter DeVoe, Marc Edmund Jones, Bo Yin Ra, Walt Whitman, and others. The last issues were published by Dane and Malya Rudhyar. Dane met Malya when she was the secretary of Will Levington Comfort, and married her in 1930. The final issue (November-December 1934) bemoaned the wave of collectivism exemplified by Fascism, Communism and the New Deal, and promised to continue the work of Hamsa in a series of "Foundation Letters" devoted to the "New Individual." LOC.

IAPSOP materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
IAPSOP respects people's privacy and personal data rights.