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| Periodical: | The White Banner (Lippard) |
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| Summary: |
From Pat Deveney's journal database:
White Banner, The. This was quite properly labeled a miscellany because it contained a variety of material that George Lippard (1822-1854) had largely published elsewhere. It consisted primarily in his novelette Adonai: The Pilgrim of Eternity, which he had published as The Entranced; or, The Wanderer of Eighteen Centuries in his Quaker City Weekly, which told the story of the early Christian martyr Lucius/Adonai, who sinks into a magnetic trance as Nero is about to have him beheaded and experiences all the bloody history of Christianity, culminating in American prisons and slavery. Lippard notes that "the power once called Magic, and now called Magnetism, can hold a human being in a state between life and death for an incredible number of years. This state (such is the supposition) may be a continued Trance, in which the body remains torpid while the Soul is active." Lippard is willing to accept this "improbable tradition" as fact for the sake of the narrative but was skeptical of the idea. The story and the other "Legends of Daily Life" in Lippard's work are told in Gothic detail, of secret rituals in darkened vaults, Rosicrucians, ghoulish skulls, scarlet altars, goblets of blood, grotesque grinning elites and plutocrats, and downtrodden humanity, always leading toward red-handed revolution and social justice. The journal was to be the official organ of Lippard's Brotherhood of the Union (Encircled in the H.F.) -- the Holy Flame or Hope of the Future -- whose constitution is appended to the journal. Lippard and his Rosicrucian fantasies were later incorporated, willy-nilly, into the Rosicrucian hierarchies of R.S. Clymer. American Antiquarian Society.
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| Issues: | White Banner V1 Jul 1851 |
| White Banner V1 Jul 1851 Alt |
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