Occult Truths.
A Monthly Devoted to Divine Alchemy / A Magazine Hinting at Divine Alchemy or that Wisdom and those Mysteries which Alone can be Understood by Initiates.
Etre toujours philosophe
1899-1907? Monthly
Washington, D.C.. Publisher: Charles W. Smiley. Editor: Anagaraka Caskadananda; Charles W. Smiley.
1/1, January 20, 1899-July-August 1901. $1.00 a year. 23 pp., 6 x 9.

The set in LOC ends with December 1901 but the journal was still being advertised (in The Life) in January 1902, and being listed in H.O. Severance, A Guide to the Current Periodicals and Serials of the United States and Canada in 1907. Despite the reference to alchemy in the journal's subtitle, it contains little on the topic and its contents are largely indistinguishable from standard New Thought journals of the period, containing articles on "The Law of Compensation," healing, "What Can Magnetism Do?", "Development of Our Supernatural Forces," "How to Become Clairvoyant," and the like, although all were written in a surprisingly literate and educated style, as were the notes on and reviews of current literature. Contribution by Peter Davidson on "Ancient and Modern Prophecies." Smiley's injunctions on conduct to experience psychic phenomena stressed eating "nothing a horse would not eat" and "Waste none of the reproductive fluids but let them be reabsorbed into the system." The latter thought was the keystone of Smiley's lessons and is buttressed in the journal by regular references to the likes of J. William Lloyd (with photograph) and Alice Bunker Stockham, two other proponents of karezza. This is what Smiley seems to have intended by the term "Divine Alchemy," which was used several years later by R.S. Clymer with much the same intention. The contribution of Caskadananda, who is otherwise unknown except for a pamphlet on "Healing With Or Without Drugs" and was almost certainly Smiley himself, to the journal seems to have been limited to his observations on his trip to Lourdes, announced in the Banner of Light for June 17, 1899. Charles Wesley Smiley (1846- ) was a statistician and wrote widely on fish, and advertised his services in the journal as a healer. According to the Washington Herald, July 27, 1913, he printed the journal in an old chicken coop near Washington, where he also ran a nature and healing sanatarium. He was said to have been forced to decamp for the West when a delivery boy came upon several young ladies on the property sunbathing in the nude. LOC; BL.

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