Psychical Research Review.
A Monthly Magazine Devoted to Psychical Research and Occultism.
Other titles: Spiritualist (New York)
1917--1918 Monthly
New York, NY.
Publisher: Psychological Publishing and Distributing Corp.
Editor: Christen P. Christensen. Succeeds: Spiritualist (New York)
Corporate author: Psychical Research Society of New york, Inc. 2/12, June 1917-4/2, February 1918.
64 pp. $1.00 a year.

This was the title by which The Spiritualist (New York) was known in its last eight months. The advertisement in The Adept, December 1917, calls this a "monthly sixty-four page magazine with spirit pictures, devoted to Psychical Research, Occultism, Astrology, Psychology, Higher Thoughts, New Thought, and Christian Science." Christensen (1867- ) was a struggling Danish immigrant trance and physical medium. The scale of his work can be deduced from his arrest in New York in 1916 as a fortune teller, where the undercover policewoman paid 25 cents to Christensen to hear his answer a question. He published the Spiritualist/Psychical Research Review as the organ of his Psychical Research Society of New York ($10.00 a year dues). To make ends meet in his publishing ventures, Christensen, like many other similar magazines of the time, touted shares in the venture (6 shares for $25,000). This journal was notable principally for regularly publishing the work of W.J. Colville and Hereward Carrington, but it also published from its first issue advertisements by the Rev. Dr. Helmuth P. Holler for his Oriental University, Inc., Universal Theomonistic Associaton, International Psychological Society, and other efforts. Christensen was a member of the last society and active at its meetings. On Holler, see the notes under Oriental University Progressive Studies, Oriental University Bulletin and Official Theomonist Record. The Review also published "Occult Story: The True Methods and the False" by "Frater Perdurabo" (Aleister Crowley) in the issue of October 1917. Christensen figures further in Crowley's story, as "Perdurabo ST" notes in his "Thelemites: Rose and Aleister Crowley's Stay in Egypt 1904," on the forthethelemites.website, since Crowley lectured before Christensen's society (probably in 1917) and there met a woman who later brought her younger sister to meet Crowley. The younger sister was Leah Hirsig (1878-1972), who needs no introduction, and the elder Marian/Marion Hirsig Dockerill, who later wrote My Life in a Love Cult (1928). Christensen advertised this journal in the International, which featured articles by Crowley. Christensen faded from view to emerge only briefly as "astrological editor" of Advanced Thought and Divine Science, and in 1925, Billboard announced that "Prof. C.P. Christensen, the mentalist, has returned to the Worlds'Circus Slide Show at Coney Island New York . . . . This will be the Professor's third season with the World Side Show, which is one of the biggest amusement places on the island." In conjunction with his act, Christensen ran a boarding house in Coney Island. LOC; NYPL; Stanford University.

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