International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals

   

Periodical: Illumination

Summary:  From Pat Deveney's database:

Illumination.
An International Journal Devoted to the Enlightenment of Man.
Man, Know Thyself! One God, One Life
1930--1931 Monthly
New York, NY. Language: English, French and German. Publisher: School of Life Foundation.
1/1, November 1930-1/5, March 1931. $3.00 a year, 42 pp.

The School of Life Foundation, the publisher of this journal, was another of the attempts made between the wars to harmonize all beliefs, promote "non-provincial, non-sectarian, non-partisan, non-racial" "cooperation and service, not competition," leading to "world peace and harmony." It was the work of Shri Vishwanath Keskar (1880-?), a university-educated Brahman from Maharastra who arrived in the United States in October 1929 after establishing his Foundation throughout Europe. He was notable enough to find a respectful mention in Wendell Thomas's Hinduism Invades America (1930). In New York he established his residence at the Roerich Museum on Riverside Drive, lecturing--for free--on meditation, Patanjali, the Bhagavad Gita, and, more generally on "Successful Living," "Shakespeare and Emerson," "Spiritual Synthesis," and the like. The journal carried several of his lectures in each issued, together with articles and excerpts from prominent proponents of his universalist, pacifistic and internationalistic beliefs: Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter, Roberto Assagioli, Rabindranath Tagore, Roerich, Auribindo Ghose, Havelock Ellis, Claude Bragdon, Alice A. Bailey, and others, many of whom lectured before the Foundation. The journal carried notices of events not only for the Foundation, but for a variety of groups with similar aims: the Roerich Museum, Alice Bailey's Arcane School, Lady Blomfield's World's Supreme Peace movement, Mme. Olga Froebe-Kapteyn's International Centre for Spiritual Research in Ascona (which published the Eranos lectures), Unity School of Christianity, The Temple of the People in Halcyon, California, and, surprisingly, Groupe des Polaires and its founder, Zam Bhotiva. Besides notices of the Temple of the People, the journal carried a letter from William H. Dower, announcing that Master Hilarion had ordered the movement to give its knowledge "to the world at large." The journal seems to have expired after its fifth issue.

Other Sources:LOC; Stanford University; NYPL.
Issues:Illumination V1 N1 Nov 1930
Illumination V1 N2 Dec 1930
Illumination V1 N3 Jan 1931
Illumination V1 N4 Feb 1931
Illumination V1 N5 Mar 1931
Claude-Generated Themes:   Illumination was a theosophically-colored occult magazine active around 1931. Its framework is Theosophical — the drama of the immortal Higher Ego against the lower personal self, and Sanskrit ethical ideals such as dana (charity) and tapas (self-discipline) — set within a broader occult vocabulary of initiation, brotherhood, and magic. Alongside doctrine it offered New-Thought counsel on concentration, the silence, and prosperity, and glanced at astrology and current affairs, including the economic anxieties of the early 1930s. It reads as a doctrinally Theosophical but eclectic and contemporary-minded occult review.

Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
Topics:Hindu Religion and Philosophy | New Thought | Theosophy