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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN NEW RELIGIONS
AND ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITIES

Essays on Women
in Western Esotericism
Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses

Edited by
Amy Hale
Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative
Spiritualities

Series Editors
James R. Lewis
School of Philosophy
Wuhan University
Wuhan, China

Henrik Bogdan
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden
Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities is an inter-
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studied under the New Religions label, the series publishes books on such
phenomena as the New Age, communal & utopian groups, Spiritualism,
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religions. The Society considers submissions from researchers in any
discipline.

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 Amy Hale
Editor

Essays on Women in
Western Esotericism
Beyond Seeresses and Sea Priestesses
Editor
Amy Hale
Stone Mountain, GA, USA

Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities

ISBN 978-3-030-76888-1    ISBN 978-3-030-76889-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76889-8

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 Acknowledgments

The editor would like to thank the following people:

Christa Shusko, Cathy Gutierrez, Elizabeth Lowry, Nell Champoux,
and Allison Coudert for assisting with the initial concept for this collection
and helping to find the right contributors.
Nell Champoux and Courtney Meunier for extra editorial and expert
proofreading support.
Amy Invernizzi at Palgrave for her incredible support and positivity.
Henrik Bogdan for being immediately and so strongly supportive of
this project and helping it to see the light of day.
Christa Shusko, Cathy Gutierrez, and Elizabeth Lowry for top-quality
collegiality.
Rhett Aultman and Robert Puckett for reading drafts, endless cheer-
leading, and so much patience.
Above all, thank you to the contributors who persevered despite some
desperate challenges. I am so grateful you all stuck with this project.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Amy Hale

Part I Race, Place, and Othering  19

2 Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney: Imperial Feminism and

Eugenics in Theosophical Evolutionist Thought 21
Jessica A. Albrecht

3 The Myth of Pamela Colman Smith’s Blackness: Ethnic

Impersonation in the Modern Esoteric Milieu 45
Thea Wirsching

4 “Eastern Methods”/“Western Bodies”: Dion Fortune’s

Shifting Positions on Yoga, 1929–1940 73
Diana Brown

Part II Locating the Feminine  107

5 The Devil Wears Pink: The Representation and Role of

Woman in the Occultism of Maria de Naglowska109
Michele Olzi

vii
viii Contents

6 The Power of Beauty: Eleanor Kirk’s Feminine

Esotericism133
Christa Shusko

7 Painterly Desire: Ithell Colquhoun’s Other-­than-­

Human Art151
Jay Johnston

Part III Rethinking Influence, Power, and Authority 171

8 Doreen Valiente: Unmotherly Mother of Modern

Witchcraft173
Vivianne Crowley

9 The Crucible of Modernity: Florence Farr and the

Esoteric Woman201
Mel Draper

10 Madeline Montalban: Magus of the Morning Star229

Julia Phillips

11 ‘The Seeker’: Frieda Harris’s Quest for Esoteric

Fulfillment255
Deja Whitehouse

12 George Yeats: Amanuensis to Inner Plane Spirits281

Susan Johnston Graf

Part IV Embodiment 301

13 “Telling the World’s Fortune”: Eileen Garrett, Psychic

Medium and Pioneer Parapsychologist303
Elizabeth Lowry
 Contents  ix

14 How to Make a Magician: Kabbalah, Psychotherapy, and

the Mechanics of Syncretism in Colette Aboulker-
Muscat’s Waking Dreamwork325
Marla Segol

15 Dion Fortune and the Temples of the Numinous357

Anne Parker-Perkola

16 True Knowledge of God Obscured in Mind and Body:

Hildegard of Bingen’s Medical and Religious
Understanding of Adam’s Fall375
Minji Lee

17 Concluding Thoughts: Beyond Seeresses and Sea

Priestesses391
Amy Hale

Index395
 Notes on Contributors

Jessica A. Albrecht is a research and teaching fellow at the University of

Heidelberg. In her current research she examines the relation between the
Theosophical Society and feminism in the British Empire.
Diana Brown is a PhD student in Religion at Syracuse University, with
research interests in American religion, new religious movements, the
occult revival, poetics, and translation.
Vivianne Crowley is a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology,
Nottingham Trent University. She specializes in the psychology of religion
and spirituality, and her current research interests include contemporary
Paganism, women religious leaders, and religious experience.
Melvyn Lloyd Draper holds a PhD in British and European History
from the University of California, Davis. His research in the histories of
esotericism and medicine focuses on the intersections of class, gender, and
race in non-­orthodox forms of healing with a particular concentration on
homeopathic medicine.
Amy Hale is an anthropologist and folklorist (PhD Folklore, UCLA)
specializing in modern Cornwall and contemporary esoteric history and
culture. She has co-edited four books and has written on topics as diverse
as modern Druidry, Cornish ethnonationalism, Pagan religious tourism,
and occult performance art. Co-edited collections include New Directions
in Celtic Studies, and The Journal of the Academic Study of Magic 5. She is
the author of Ithell Colquhoun: Genius of the Fern Loved Gully (2020).

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Susan Johnston Graf is Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State

University and author of W. B. Yeats, Twentieth-Century Magus and
Talking to the Gods: Occultism in the Work of W.B. Yeats, Arthur Machen,
Algernon Blackwood, and Dion Fortune. Johnston Graf teaches writing
and literature at The Pennsylvania State University.
Jay Johnston is an Associate Professor, University of Sydney, an interdis-
ciplinary scholar at the interface of religion, philosophy, and the arts who
investigates and proposes concepts of materiality, embodiment, environ-
ment, image agency, and epistemology. She is author of over 40 publica-
tions including Angels of Desire: Esoteric Bodies, Aesthetics and Ethics
(2009) and most recently co-editor (with Alexandra Grieser) of Aesthetics
of Religion: A Connective Concept (2018).
Minji Lee is an Assistant Professor teaching courses in both the
Department of Religion and the new Medical Humanities Program major
in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Montclair State
University.
Elizabeth Lowry is a Senior Lecturer in Writing, Rhetoric, and Language
at Arizona State University. She is the author of Invisible Hosts: Performing
the Nineteenth Century Spirit-Medium’s Autobiography (SUNY 2017).
Michele Olzi received a PhD degree in Medical Humanities from the
University of Insubria (Varese) in 2019. His research project focused on
the life and work of the Italian psychoanalyst Emilio Servadio (1904–1995).
His interests include the connection between avant-garde art movements
and Occultism/ Theosophy/Anthroposophy, Religion and Media,
History of Sexology and Psychoanalysis, and Neo-gnosticism in Italy in
the early years of the twentieth century. He edits the online journal La
Rosa di Paracelso.
Anne Parker-Perkola is a PhD candidate at the Rice University
Department of Religion in Contemplative Studies. Research interests
include medieval European and medieval Tibetan esotericisms.
Julia Phillips is in year two of her PhD research at the University of
Bristol, examining witchcraft and the press in Victorian Britain. Her work
uses a multi-disciplined approach combining the history of witchcraft, the
development of newspapers and journalism in the nineteenth century, and
the culture of Victorian Britain. Her interest in Madeline Montalban dates
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

from the 1970s, when she first read her articles in Prediction magazine.
Phillips’s biography of Montalban was published by Neptune Press
in 2012.
Marla Segol holds the Professorship in Jewish Studies at the University
at Buffalo, in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies. She
earned her PhD in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University New
Brunswick in 2001. Since then she has worked in the fields of kabbalah,
Jewish magic, New Age Religion, and the history of the body and sexuality.
Christa Shusko is an independent scholar and a member of the board of
the Communal Studies Association. Recent publications include
“Criticising the Dead: The Oneida Community and Spiritualism” in The
Handbook of Spiritualism and Channeling (Brill, 2015); “Alcohol
Consumption, Transgression, and Death” in Dying to Eat: Cross-cultural
Perspectives on Food in Dying, Death, and Afterlives (University of Kentucky
Press, 2018); and “Religions of the Red Planet: Fin de Siècle Martian
Romances” in The Paranormal and Popular Culture (London:
Routledge, 2019).
Deja Whitehouse Following 25 years in commercial business analysis
and training, Deja Whitehouse completed her doctoral thesis In Search of
Frieda Harris, under the supervision of Professor Ronald Hutton, and
was awarded her PhD from the University of Bristol in January 2020.
Thea Wirsching received her PhD in American literature from UCLA in
2012. Her research focused on the history of the occult in America, a
topic she explores in her project The American Renaissance Tarot (2021).
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 (a,b) Cosmic Process of male and female and stages of
humanity, explained by cosmological symbols in The Mystery of
the Circle and the Cross (1908) Swiney, Frances. The Mystery of
the Circle and the Cross, London: Open Road Publications, 1908 28
Fig. 3.1 Pamela Colman Smith, “West Indian Folk Tales told by
Gelukiezanger.” Advertisement in The Green Sheaf, vol. 6, 1903,
p. 16. Yellow Nineties 2.0, edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra,
Ryerson University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2020 50
Fig. 10.1 Young Madeline Montalban, Copyright Cleone Parr 241

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Amy Hale

Any academic work, any collection of essays, is defined by a time and a

place, although we customarily do not acknowledge it in the text itself. We
do this ostensibly so that our work does not become explicitly dated.
Instead, we pretend it is timeless or situated within the context of bigger
discourses that move beyond and through history. Yet to pretend in this
case that this particular collection was not shaped by immense and singular
world events is not a fiction that I as editor want to uphold, precisely
because it is so utterly significant to the wider subject at hand, women’s
lives, and how we conceive of them in the world. Additionally, in volumes
such as these, we normally expect the editorial voice to be silent, yet this
too is a fiction, as any collection is shaped by choice, taste, and experience.
As feminist scholarship encourages subjectivity and reflexivity, I believe
that some transparency about the making of this book is justified.
Although the idea for this collection came about many years prior to its
publication, the bulk of the work was completed in the shadow of the
pandemic of 2020. The contributors to this volume experienced immense
disruption in bringing these essays to fruition: the loss of family members,

A. Hale (*)
Stone Mountain, GA, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
A. Hale (ed.), Essays on Women in Western Esotericism, Palgrave
Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76889-8_1
2 A. HALE

caretaking of loved ones, spectacular and unprecedented professional bur-

dens, personal illness, loss of access to research libraries, political upheaval,
and employment precarity. Although the contributors are not exclusively
women, this volume does focus on women’s scholarship, and the pan-
demic has shown us that when the system cracks, women’s careers and
personal priorities are significantly impacted. Nevertheless, the contribu-
tors to this volume, regardless of gender, have remained deeply committed
to bringing it to light in what at times seemed like the darkest of circum-
stances. I believe it is critically important that the scholarly community,
regardless of relationship to the institutions of academia, acknowledge
that scholars are human first and that scholarship requires time and
resources, both of which were stretched to the limit in the compilation of
this book. I cannot pretend that this volume was not born from a time of
great struggle, and that years from now when the events of 2020 are hope-
fully well behind us, that we will remain mindful of the contexts that
shaped it.

Rationale
This volume has three primary objectives: The first is to profile women
who have suffered from a lack of scholarly attention within the study of
esotericism. The second objective is to highlight women’s scholarship.
The third is to engage with wider discourses and current conversations
within the study of esotericism. Regarding the first and primary objective,
it seems rather remarkable that it has taken so long for a single volume
profiling the histories of women in esotericism to emerge, especially given
that the wider topic of women in religion in a variety of contexts has had
no shortage of academic discussion. The original impetus for this volume
was inspired by a stroll through the book stalls at a major academic confer-
ence. At each stall featuring academic collections devoted to the study of
Western esotericism, I browsed through the books, taking stock of how
women were featured, both as subjects of study and also as scholars. In
both instances, women were frequently tokenized, or relegated to a single
chapter.1 The study of women in esotericism has been framed as marginal

1
Even forward-thinking volumes such as Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm’s
Contemporary Esotericism have a token “women and gender” chapter; Jay Johnston, “A
Deliciously Troubling Duo: Gender and Esotericism,” in Contemporary Esotericism, ed. by
Egil Asprem and Kennet Granholm (London: Routledge, 2014): 410–425. Antoine Faivre,
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

or as a sideline to the histories of men. Even the 2019 volume Hermes

Explains: Thirty Questions about Western Esotericism, designed to approach
specific, targeted concerns about the field, reduces the inclusion of women
to a single chapter and a “problem” to be addressed.2 This situation is
rapidly changing, and there is an emerging and vigorous interest in the
history and contribution of women in esotericism, much of it completed
by women scholars. However, the academic history of esotericism has
largely been, until recently, a story told by, about, and for other men
through the lenses of men’s experience. Given that there is no lack of aca-
demic discussions about women and religion, this leads to at least one
conclusion that the lacuna in the study of esotericism is more the result of
the dynamics of the field as it has been currently defined and by its limited
institutional expressions. The question becomes, then, not how women’s
stories should fit into this dominant narrative, but how women’s experi-
ences challenge and break the narrative itself.
There has been a recent academic reconsideration of approaches to the
study of esotericism, exemplified by critical volumes such as Asprem and
Strube’s edition New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism, and this vol-
ume will hopefully contribute to that reassessment.3 The essays in New
Approaches, in essence, argue for greater inclusion by challenging the pri-
mary assumptions and definitions which have arguably constrained the
study of esotericism. The editors and contributors advocate for a variety of
perspectives which have yet gone under- or un-explored in the field,
including race, class, and gender. Yet despite Manon Hedenborg White’s
chapter on positional femininities (the only chapter in the volume specifi-
cally concerned with the study of gender), the problem of the general
paucity of studies of women within esotericism as a whole is still remark-
ably understated.4

Western Esotericism: A Concise History, trans. Christine Rhone (New York: State University
of New York Press, 2010) also includes very few women.
2
Allison P. Coudert, “There’s Not Much Room for Women in Esotericism, Right?,” in
Hermes Explains: Thirty Questions about Western Esotericism, ed. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Peter
J. Forshaw, and Marco Pasi (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 70–79.
3
Egil Asprem and Julian Strube, “Esotericism’s Expanding Horizon: Why This Book
Came to Be,” in New Approaches to The Study of Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 1–19.
4
Manon Hedenborg White, “Double Toil and Gender Trouble? Performativity and
Femininity in the Cauldron of Esotericism Research,” in New Approaches to the Study of
Esotericism, ed. Egil Asprem and Julian Strube (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 182–200.
4 A. HALE

There have, of course, been notable exceptions which have provided

the foundations for the present volume, particularly given the emphasis in
this collection on women whose lives spanned the late nineteenth to mid
twentieth centuries. As this collection shows, this period continues to be
of great interest to researchers. Joy Dixon’s 2001 Divine Feminine:
Theosophy and Feminism in England explored an emergent, Theosophically
driven, feminist spirituality in the late nineteenth century that intersected
with and sustained feminist politics of the time. This is a theme which
emerges and reemerges, seen also in Alex Owen’s landmark studies The
Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian
England and The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Cult of
the Modern which further supported scholarship on the wider societal
implications of women’s interest in the occult in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century. Tatiana Kontou’s collection Women and the Victorian
Occult addresses primarily literary themes of women and the occult while
Per Faxneld’s Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Woman in
Nineteenth Century Culture. remains a groundbreaking study focusing on
intersections of esotericism, occultism, literature, and emergent feminist
politics rooted in transgressive and liberating images of Lucifer and Satan.
Although Mary K Greer’s Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses
is not an academic study, it is nevertheless noteworthy in that it reposi-
tioned women as key contributors to the Golden Dawn, one of the most
important modern esoteric orders. Greer forced a reconsideration of how
the Golden Dawn was unusually progressive where the equality of women
was concerned, both ritually and ideologically. Although not strictly
Victorian in its scope, Jay Johnston’s 2008 Angels of Desire is another dis-
tinguishing precursor to present developments in explorations of women’s
esotericisms both in its application of feminist theory and in its focus on
the complicated realities of understanding the esoteric body.
In addition to Victoriana, there are a couple of other areas within the
wider study of esotericism where research into women has not been
absent. One outlier is the study of Spiritualism, where naturally one focus
of research has been on women’s participation and leadership.5 The previ-
ously mentioned study by Owen, and those of Kontou and Lowry demon-
strate the importance of Spiritualism and women to the development of

5
See: Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-
Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

modern esotericism and the modern occult.6 The study of Spiritualism in

particular further encourages the discussion of wider intersectional topics
such as race and class which are sorely underarticulated in the study of
Western esotericism. However, in the wider scholarly narratives of esoteri-
cism, Spiritualism is still treated as a deviation from a broadly philosophical
and Hermetically dominant narrative. It is also worth noting that in her
brief survey of the position of academic research regarding gender in the
study of esotericism, Jay Johnston has commented on the fact that many
of the mentions of women’s roles in esotericism have featured in volumes
about sex and sexuality.7 This alone speaks volumes.
As the study of esotericism undergoes important internal conversations
about its nature and the boundaries of the subject, we are starting to see
an expansion in the focus and methodologies related to women and eso-
tericism. Since this volume was first conceptualized, several key studies
exploring the histories of contemporary women, gender and their rela-
tionship to esotericism have been published. A notable example is Manon
Hedenborg White’s ethnographic study of Babalon worship in the
Thelemic occult milieu, important not only for its subject matter but also
in its methods.8 Shai Feraro’s important study of women in British Wicca
chronicles the intersections of emerging Wicca and Paganism in Britain
with second wave feminism in the second half of the twentieth century.9
Even though it can be argued that feminism has had more of an impact on
Wicca and Paganism than in other forms of modern esoteric culture, even
in Pagan Studies there is still a lack of scholarship devoted specifically to
women, women’s traditions, or gender. The work of Wendy Griffin on
feminism in Paganism and Jone Salmonsen’s Enchanted Feminism: Ritual,
Gender and Divinity Among the Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco are
the primary exceptions.10 Significant figures in modern esotericism and
6
Tatiana Kontou, Spiritualism and Women’s Writing: From the Fin de Siècle to the Neo-
Victorian (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Elizabeth Schleber Lowry, Invisible Hosts:
Performing the Nineteenth-Century Spirit Mediums’ Autobiography (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2017).
7
See Jay Johnston’s discussion of the work of Hugh Urban’s Magia Sexualis and Wouter
Hanegraaff and Jeffrey Kripal’s Hidden Intercourse in: “A Deliciously Troubling Duo,” 413.
8
Manon Hedenborg White, The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon and the Construction
of Femininities in Western Esotericism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
9
Shai Feraro, Women and Gender Issues in British Paganism, 1945–1990 (Cham, CH:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
10
Wendy Griffin published extensively on women, feminism and contemporary Paganism:
“The Embodied Goddess Feminist Witchcraft and Female Divinity,” Sociology of Religion 56,
6 A. HALE

contemporary Paganism such as Dion Fortune or Doreen Valiente still

have received little to no significant academic treatment. Even a towering
figure such as Helena Blavatsky seems under-researched, despite Julia
Chajes recent pioneering academic study.11 In 2021 the first symposium of
the Esotericism, Gender and Sexuality Network featured groundbreaking
critical research regarding women’s history within esotericism, masculini-
ties and queer theory, all of which are essential in developing the boundar-
ies of research into the study of esotericism.

Definitions and Constraints

As Kocku von Stuckrad has commented, grand historical narratives, such
as the ones which have shaped the study of esotericism, create “power
structures and societal realities”, and these have undoubtedly contributed
to a general exclusion of women’s experiences within the study of esoteri-
cism.12 The study of Western esotericism, has been academically con-
structed in terms of a culture which is elite, White, overwhelmingly male,
and literate, and some scholars have argued that this demographic focus
comprises necessary defining features of the field which should not be
compromised. As an aside, ironically, the 2007 collection edited by von
Stuckrad and Olaf Hammer devoted to discourses of esotericism, identi-
ties, and othering, excluded women both as subjects and as scholarly con-
tributors. In a panel discussion at the 2012 First International Conference
on Contemporary Esotericism, Wouter Hanegraaff, Kocku von Stuckrad,
and Christopher Partridge explicitly rejected the integration of what might
be considered folk material into the study of Western esotericism, an argu-
ment which has significant exclusionary implications for the research
boundaries of the field.13 They argued that the texts of Western e­ sotericism

no. 1 (1995), 35–49. Also see: Wendy Griffin, ed., Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of
Healing, Identity & Empowerment (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2000); Jone Salomonsen,
Enchanted Feminism: Ritual, Gender and Divinity Among the Reclaiming Witches of San
Francisco (London: Routledge, 2002).
11
Julia Chajes, Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2019).
12
Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad, eds. Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse
and Its Others (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 221.
13
Contemporary Esotericism Research Network, “Roundtable Discussion on
Contemporary Esotericism,” June 22, 2016, video, 1:57:30, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=LjI_pxQXVi4.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

are the products of an educated and literate culture, and that incorporat-
ing the study of non-elite or vernacular practices would weaken the disci-
pline’s integrity. While these assertions were not specifically related to the
inclusion of women, there is no question that defining the field by these
parameters sets ground rules that impacts the legitimacy and inclusion of
research into women’s contributions and perhaps unintentionally has cre-
ated a bias against the study of women in esotericism. In addressing the
stories and experiences of women, it is difficult to ignore questions of
class, literacy, race, embodiment and relationships to power and institu-
tions. It has long been accepted in the wider study of religion that artifacts
and texts relating to women’s religiosity are frequently not available.14
This should not be mistaken for being nonexistent or unimportant.
Scholarship about women’s roles and contributions to the esoteric
milieu also challenges current overarching narratives about the develop-
ment of esotericism as a rejected category of thought. Hanegraaff has
argued that the discourses surrounding the study of esotericism, and pos-
sibly esotericism itself, indicate explicit resistance to the dominant Western
narratives of rationality and monotheism.15 However, it is arguable
whether or not rationality and monotheism actually undergird a coherent
sense of European identity in the totalizing ways that Hanegraaff suggests,
and it is certainly unlikely that marginalized populations, including
women, would have a complete ideological attachment to them. While
rationality and secularism may have indelibly shaped the nature and char-
acter of modern European institutions, in terms of most people’s lived
experience, rationality is deeply situational and simply not universally val-
ued. Defining esoteric practices and beliefs primarily in opposition to these
principles fails to take into account the messy, incoherent and contradic-
tory nature of many people’s worldviews and actions. For many, esoteric
worldviews are neither neatly theorized nor are they exercises in

14
David Kinsley, “Women’s Studies in the History of Religions” in Methodology in Religious
Studies: The Interface with Women’s Studies, ed. Arvind Sharma (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2002), 1–15.
15
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “Forbidden Knowledge: Anti-Esoteric Polemics and Academic
Research,” Aries 5, no. 2 (2005): 225–254. As Asprem also notes in “Rejected Knowledge
Reconsidered” there has been a conflation of the categories of the history of the study of
esotericism and the subject itself, which causes some confusion in how scholars talk about the
nature of the field; Egil Asprem, “Rejected Knowledge Reconsidered: Some Methodological
Notes on Esotericism and Marginality,” in New Approaches to the Study of Esotericism, ed.
Egil Asprem and Julian Strube (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 134.
8 A. HALE

oppositional identity formation. Contrary to Hanegraaff’s argument,

women and other marginalized groups do not self-other by adopting
counter rational views as a resistance strategy and many practitioners
would not define themselves as being particularly heretical.16 Esoteric
beliefs and practices were and are likely just part of the fabric of already
marginalized lives. Magic is how people in need get things done, and
unseen beings are just a part of the world in which people live. These tac-
tics and perspectives are foundational to esoteric cosmologies, especially if
one holds to Faivre’s operational definitions of esotericism which include
correspondences, living nature, imagination and mediation, and
transmutation.17
As such, one aim of this volume is to reintegrate magico-religious
witchcraft and contemporary Paganisms into the study of esotericism. The
study of witchcraft edges too closely to the non-elite, non-literate cultural
artifacts that some scholars of esotericism hope to avoid, yet this exclu-
sionary boundary reinforces stereotypes that women are witches and men
are magicians, further excluding women from the field of study. Despite
the fact that both historical and modern magico-religious witchcraft share
history, method, and practice with what has been called Western esoteri-
cism, these groups are routinely excluded in esoteric scholarship except for
the occasional cursory mention. For the most part, witchcraft tropes,
icons, and trials are covered in departments of history and literature, and
modern magico-religious witchcraft is chiefly explored within Pagan
Studies, an allied yet somewhat separate field to the study of esotericism.
Both women and class are key elements in the study of witchcraft from any
era, and it seems that the exclusion of witchcraft, and for that matter much
of contemporary Paganism from the grand narratives of the study of eso-
tericism supports deliberate boundary choices. However, as the study of
both esotericism and witchcraft becomes more culturally and geographi-
cally diverse, we should expect that these definitional boundaries will con-
tinue to shift.
There is no single definition of esotericism that the scholars here have
utilized in their chapters or to which they have been expected to conform.
There is also no common definition of women advanced in this volume,

16
See: Asprem “Rejected Knowledge Reconsidered” for the full argument against
Hanegraaff.
17
Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1994).
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

and no gender binary or cisnormativity should be assumed as an editorial

stance. Nevertheless, despite this flexibility and the attempts of this vol-
ume to expand some disciplinary boundaries, there are still serious gaps in
this volume. Queer and trans theory are not significantly represented here
in terms of focus or methodology, and there are no women of color fea-
tured as subjects of these chapters. While there is no good excuse for these
gaps, there is perhaps a contributing historical factor. Readers will note
that many of the women under consideration in this collection embraced
normative, essentialist categories and championed a vision of a uniquely
“Western” spiritual identity. While this is not the story that many of us as
scholars want to tell today, scholars of both contemporary Paganism and
occult communities can acknowledge a persistent and striking lack of
diversity at best and a legacy of White supremacy at worst.18 The historical
narratives surrounding Whiteness and the West, particularly in esoteric
communities from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century onward,
laid the groundwork for the current circumstances. In this volume we see
early examples of how esoteric women understood gender and race in
biologically essentialist ways that have been stubbornly persistent, and in
magical subcultures are only now currently being problematized and
questioned on a larger scale. Nevertheless, in both the scholarship and in
contemporary magical and occult communities, there is resistance to
questioning the value of deeply essential categories and also to even
acknowledging the power dynamics and relationships of them.
Although esotericism is frequently associated with transgression, taboo
and heterodoxy,19 the women profiled in this volume demonstrate the
multivalent ways in which norms and values are framed within esoteric
contexts. The modern, or postmodern, reader might be frustrated with
the seeming contradiction that many of the women profiled here would
have considered themselves to be for the time, progressive, yet the lens
through which these women filtered most of the world is hardly radical by
today’s standards, and in most cases reinforced categorical norms. Even
though the subjects of many of these studies come from the early twenti-
eth century, it is not as though race and gender categories were not being
questioned and unsettled at the time, as fears of “masculinized” New

18
Justine Bakker, “Race and (the Study of) Esotericism” in New Approaches to the Study of
Esotericism, ed. Egil Asprem and Julian Strube (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 147.
19
See: Johnston “A Deliciously Troubling Duo,” 412 and 413 for an interesting take on
the study of esotericism and taboo.
10 A. HALE

Women made clear. There were queer communities, there was transgres-
sion, there was variance in gender presentation and performance, but
within esoteric communities, normative categories were and are seemingly
often reinforced. Owen and Hedenborg White have both argued that eso-
teric and occult communities have created spaces for the disruption of
gender norms, and while the occult milieu has allowed for certain gen-
dered behaviors and positions to be more fluid, on the whole, femininity
as a category within esotericism has remained particularly valorized and
embraced within the context of women’s activism.20 Of course, it was
believed during the nineteenth century that women’s particular feminine
sensibilities allowed them to more easily commune with supernatural enti-
ties, which made women’s engagement with emergent occult milieus
understandable. Yet many of these women wanted to change the valence
of the social value of the feminine as a way of engaging with ideas of prog-
ress. For instance, a greater value on motherhood becomes a vehicle for
the moral transformation of society, instead of a denigrated, domestic role.
What we can deduce from this, at least partially, is the power of the
Platonic ideal as a driving force within most of the esoteric frameworks
under consideration in this volume. The divine, mechanistic structure of
the universe was a leading assumption, and everything was believed to
have essential qualities and defining characteristics. This preoccupation
was mirrored by scientific taxonomic efforts which spring boarded after
the mid nineteenth century. Thus, social and political projects undergirded
by these forms of esotericism for the most part did not involve breaking
down the essential structures of society. Understanding and embracing
“natural” divisions encouraged an alignment with one’s true nature, which
is where one’s power can be truly harnessed. This is not to say that a queer
lens and a critical gendered approach would not be useful in examining
many of the histories here, and this is yet another revisioning of the study
of esotericism that needs urgent attention. While the women covered in
this volume may have been working from and valued essentialist con-
structs, different scholarly approaches might view these stories differently,
and tell other stories altogether that would widen our understanding of
how queer an esoteric way of living truly is.21

20
See: Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian
England (London: Virago, 1989); White, The Eloquent Blood.
21
See Johnston’s call for a further queering of the study of esotericism in “A Deliciously
Troubling Duo,” 424.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

As gender expressions and roles were essentialized, so was the perceived

relationship between one’s spiritual capacity and their culture or “race,”
and this concern is expressed in several of the contributions here, which is
an additional area of feedback between the historical study of esotericism
and its object. There has been a recent and vigorous debate about the role
of the “West” in the field which has been known as “Western” esotericism.
Egil Asprem, Julian Strube, Allan Killner Johnson and others have argued
that the “Western” in Western esotericism reifies an othering and colonial-
ist perspective inherent in the methodologies of the field.22 “Western” also
artificially limits and constrains the subject of the field, excluding esoteri-
cisms which flourish in a variety of non-White, non-European contexts.
Despite the inclusion of “Western” in the title of this book, as the editor,
I agree with this assessment (although it is possible that some of the con-
tributors may feel differently), and I believe that ultimately dropping
“Western” will make the field more robust, diverse, and will encourage
much needed interdisciplinary engagement with other fields.
However, one outcome of this historical orientation of the field of
study is that this collection demonstrates the ways in which both scholars
and subjects have engaged with what is emically understood as “Western”
esotericism. There is no doubt that many of the women covered in this
volume were very invested in an idea of a specifically “Western” esoteric
tradition and this characterization has influenced the direction and bound-
aries of scholarship.23 The study of “Western” esotericism has been less
about place, culture, and geography as it has been about methodology and
definition of subject.24 The term has become weighty and ideologically
laden, implicated with colonialism, outdated notions of race, and we must
acknowledge, Whiteness. Yet it still reflects historical discourses which are
relevant to the shapes and contours of this volume. This has produced
some gaps in this collection which reflect the currently contested bound-
aries of the field and the contexts in which it has emerged. Although

22
Kennet Granholm, “Locating the West: Problematizing the Western in Western
Esotericism and Occultism,” in Occultism in a Global Perspective, ed. Henrik Bogdan and
Gordan Djurdjevic (London: Acumen Publishing, 2013), 17–36.
23
See: Susannah Crockford and Egil Asprem, “Ethnographies of the Esoteric: Introducing
Anthropological Methods and Theories to the Study of Contemporary Esotericism,”
Correspondences 6, no. 1 (2018): 1–23 for a discussion of the intersections of “Western” and
methodological concerns in the field of Western esotericism.
24
Aren Roukema and Allan Kilner-Johnson, “Editorial: Time to Drop the ‘Western,’”
Correspondences 6, no. 2 (2018): 109–115.
12 A. HALE

Wirsching and Parker-Perkola’s chapters explicitly address some of the

problems of Whiteness in the scholarship, there are no chapters in this
volume directly addressing the contributions of women of color. I fully
expect that the current attempts to expand the parameters of the study of
esotericism will produce much more diverse and inclusive volumes in
the future.

How This Book Is Organized

The women featured in this volume are rather concentrated in terms of
geography and time period. The majority of the women profiled in the
volume are British, living primarily in the late nineteenth to mid twentieth
centuries, and thus the focus of the scholarship might be interpreted as the
fundamental moment when women were laying the groundwork for the
direction of contemporary esoteric and occult movements. As a result, the
trends in the scholarship in this volume is a function of the period in which
women’s leadership in esoteric movements was becoming more visible.
This corresponds with the increase in women’s participation and visibility
in other social movements, suffrage, worker’s rights, birth control, animal
welfare, temperance, and it is no surprise that women’s spirituality merged
with their political aims.25 The women profiled here broadly exemplify the
historical tendencies of women from the early twentieth century to fashion
esotericism as a vehicle for both personal and societal transformation.
They did this by providing the metaphorical frameworks for equity, and
increasing the understanding of women’s position and capacities. This is
true even of the much earlier work of Hildegard of Bingen, whose esoteric
interpretation of the Fall provided a commentary on women’s revelatory
potential for salvation.
Given that the scholars for this collection were invited and the topics
were thus subject to some level of eclecticism, as editor I wanted to see
what, if any, themes emerged from the chapters, to determine if there were
any wider generalizations that could be made about women’s engagement
with the esoteric. As it turns out, the essays fell into four general catego-
ries: race and othering, notions of femininity, leadership and influence,
and embodiment.

25
See: Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001); Owen, The Place of Enchantment.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

The first section, “Race, Place, and Othering” features chapters which
explore how women positioned themselves and developed idealized theo-
ries of practice within the construct of “Western” spiritualities and the
often-attendant category of Whiteness. We also see how colonialism
impacted the identities of women esotericists, highlighting hybridities and
challenges to spiritual trends that frequently emphasized an essentialist
framework for both people and places. The essays in this volume reveal,
particularly in the first part of the twentieth century, that the idea of
bounded racial identities informed the ways that women of the period
characterized their own spiritual pursuits, and particularly the ways in
which their spirituality intersected with social and political concerns. These
women absolutely believed that different peoples had different ways of
approaching the world, and their own rational approaches to spirituality
and ideas of social progress suggested that each culture use the tools which
were most appropriate to them. Although these approaches are deeply
problematic, cultural taxonomies were understood during this period as
bounded scientific realities. These chapters thus demonstrate the ways in
which women esotericists of the early twentieth century were engaging
with wider ideas of science and societal progress. The overarching theme
is, of course, the ways in which Whiteness becomes the unarticulated
interpretive framework through which esotericism is theorized.
First, Jessica Albrecht discusses Frances Swiney’s Theosophical femi-
nism, which, shaped by her own upbringing in the context of Indian colo-
nization, incorporates race theory, birth control, and eugenics, into a
version of the morally uplifting, liberated woman, a vehicle for the divine
feminine. In the first of the collections’ essays on Dion Fortune, Diana
Brown refutes the conventional scholarly wisdom regarding Fortune’s
position on whether or not yoga is suitable for the Western temperament.
Brown argues that, in fact, Fortune’s views shifted over the course of her
life, displaying flexibility, and possible personal evolution regarding the
mutability of cultural characteristics. Thea Wirsching’s chapter regarding
the imagined Black identity of Pamela Colman Smith provides a scorching
and potentially controversial response to those who have attempted to
portray Coleman Smith as a tokenized person of color within the contem-
porary esoteric milieu. Wirsching argues that Coleman Smith was not of
Jamaican ancestry, and that her racialized performance was derived from
minstrel traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
She concludes that attempts to claim a Black identity for a White woman
of a privileged background erases the Black experience.
14 A. HALE

The chapters in the second section, “Locating the Feminine”, explore

the ways in which constructions of “femininity” have dominated dis-
courses of women’s empowerment within the esoteric milieu, a topic
which Hedenborg White has addressed at some length.26 These chapters
demonstrate how women have subverted and strategically reinforced
“femininity” as both an essential and liberatory trait of women. For many
early women esotericists, “feminine” forms of beauty and motherhood
were reforming and civilizing traits that had the potential to elevate soci-
ety to a more spiritually perfected state. Michele Olzi’s chapter on the
remarkable Maria de Naglowska shows how de Naglowska conceived of
woman’s purity as having the ability to not only reform men, but also to
bring about a new age of humanity within the framework of liberatory
Satanism. Christa Shusko writes about Eleanor Kirk’s popular journalism
of the early twentieth century and her arguments for the cultivation of
beauty as a moral imperative in an early bridging of esotericism and the
wellness and beauty industries. Finally, Jay Johnston addresses several of
the themes of this collection in her chapter about Ithell Colquhoun’s
engagement with the other than human worlds and painterly desire.
Adopting a framework of Esoteric Aesthetics, Johnston explores
Colquhoun’s subversion of feminized categories of artistic production,
supersensual perception, mediumship and divination, watercolors and
landscapes, through her explicit identity as a ceremonial magician.
The third section, “Rethinking Influence, Authority and Power”
includes chapters highlighting the contributions of some important yet
relatively unexamined figures within the history of esotericism. Several
contributions redefine gendered power relationships within esoteric envi-
ronments while reconsidering roles of leadership and authority. Although
Doreen Valiente is a towering figure within the history of Wicca and mod-
ern Paganism, here Vivianne Crowley profiles Valiente’s contributions in
making a wider cultural space for Pagan religions in the UK. Melvyn
Draper discusses the actor and innovative Golden Dawn magician Florence
Farr, explaining how her vision of women’s emancipation was driven by
the esoteric principles found in the Golden Dawn system. Julia Philips
provides an introduction to the mercurial and influential Madeline
Montalban, who, despite her high profile in London’s occult circles in the
mid twentieth century, remains a marginal figure in conventional occult
histories. Philips argues that Montalban’s model of esoteric authority was

26
White, “Double Toil and Gender Trouble?,” 182–200; White, The Eloquent Blood.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

at odds with becoming a more widely known occult leader, although the
magical order she founded has had lasting appeal. Deja Whitehouse exam-
ines the spiritual motivations of the artist behind the Thoth tarot deck,
Frieda, Lady Harris, who maintained an unconventional friendship with
Aleister Crowley while supporting the political aspirations of her husband.
Finally, Susan Johnston Graf reconsiders the esoteric contributions of
Georgie Hyde Lees, wife of W.B. Yeats, recasting her as a magical adept in
her own right.
The fourth section, “Embodiment” includes chapters focusing on prac-
tice as experienced through a gendered conception of the body. Some of
these chapters especially concern the constructions of essentialized func-
tions of women’s bodies, and the ways in which metaphysical beliefs about
“the nature of woman” both informs esoteric beliefs and practices and
shapes women’s social roles and discourses in this milieu. This part also
intersects with the extension of esoteric practice into health and medicine
and the contribution of women practitioners in this area. Elizabeth
Lowry’s chapter on the medium and boundary breaking parapsychologist
Eileen Garrett profiles a woman who navigated the boundaries between
male and female “knowing,” traversing the gendered discourses of medi-
umship and science by reinterpreting the psychic experiments on her own
body. Marla Segol analyzes the therapeutic dream techniques of Algerian
born Israeli therapist Colette Aboulker Muscat, demonstrating her syn-
thesis of esoteric Kabbalistic scholarship with modern psychotherapy. In
the only pre-modern essay of this collection, Minji Lee discusses how
Hildegard of Bingen conceptualized women’s bodies as a conduit of
God’s prophecy. Returning to the work of Dion Fortune, Anne Parker
Percola writes about the cultivation of sense awareness and embodiment
in Fortune’s conceptions of ritual and initiation.
The contributors to this volume, who are primarily but not exclusively
women, represent a wide range of relationships to the academic establish-
ment and in some case none at all. They are tenured professors, indepen-
dent scholars, contingent faculty and graduate students. It is my
intention as editor that this diversity will help support and encourage a
wider variety of voices and scholarly approaches within the field of the
study of esotericism. I also hope to bring awareness to the wealth of excel-
lent research being conducted on women’s esoteric histories which is
occurring parallel to traditional academic spaces. Yet if this volume does
nothing else, it will spotlight the contributions of some of the greater and
lesser-known women who were not quite satisfied with the limits of the
16 A. HALE

known world. Most of these women were not only profoundly spiritually
inspired, they were activists, teachers and leaders who were for the most
part trying to inspire change, frequently with a commitment to making
the world a better and more civilized place for women. They often knew
that we change the world by changing the stories we tell about it, and
hopefully this collection will play some small role in reshaping how we
think about women’s contributions to the history of Western
esotericism.

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———. 2021. Rejected Knowledge Reconsidered: Some Methodological Notes
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 1 INTRODUCTION 17

Faivre, Antoine. 1994. Access to Western Esotericism. Albany: State University of

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———. 2010. Western Esotericism: A Concise History. Trans. Christine Rhone.
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 PART I

Race, Place, and Othering

 CHAPTER 2

Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney: Imperial

Feminism and Eugenics in Theosophical
Evolutionist Thought

Jessica A. Albrecht

All emanations are from that mystery of the Divine Mother, and must return
to it. (…) Even as science reveals that all life has a feminine origin. (…) The
Feminine is therefore the inner nature of man, and woman as the most
highly evolved organism (…) is the objective representative of the Divine
Feminine.1

These words perfectly summarize Frances Swiney’s (1847–1922) theo-

sophical feminist ideas. Swiney was an outspoken feminist, active in local
as well as national and international societies. In 1896, she co-founded
and was president of the Cheltenham Woman’s Suffrage Society
(Cheltenham WSS) and was Vice-President of the Cheltenham Food
1
Frances Swiney, The Esoteric Teaching of the Gnostics (London: Yellon, William & Co,
1908), 12 and 21.

J. A. Albrecht (*)
Department of Religious Studies, University of Heidelberg,
Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: Jessica.Albrecht@ts.uni-heidelberg.de

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2021
A. Hale (ed.), Essays on Women in Western Esotericism, Palgrave
Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76889-8_2
22 J. A. ALBRECHT

Reform and Health Association. Swiney was also a member of the

Sociological Society, the Secular Education League, the Woman’s Freedom
League, the National Union of Women Workers, the National Women’s
Social and Political Union, the Eugenics Education Society and the
Theosophical Society. This is why she often lectured in lodges of the
Theosophical Society, in the Higher Thought Centre in London and in
various branches of the Ethical Society. Furthermore, Swiney was a mem-
ber of the council of the Woman’s Branch of the International Neo-­
Malthusian League.2 In addition, Swiney was an ardent feminist writer.
Apart from engaging in feminist debates in The Anglo-Russian, the
Christian Commonwealth, The Awakener, The Westminster Review as well
as the Indian Ladies’ Magazine and the American feminist paper The
Woman’s Tribune, Swiney published a series of books and pamphlets.
Since 1910, her books were co-published by the League of Isis, which she
had founded in 1909. The League of Isis aimed on bringing about “the
betterment of the Race, by individual observance of the Natural Law of
reproduction (…) for the building up of the Higher Self.”3 Swiney
believed, as other theosophists did as well, that Theosophy can overcome
the boundaries between science and religion. The future of the human
race would be a development onto a spiritual evolution: a return to being
one with the Divine Mother (Isis). Swiney’s vision of “race”4 was informed
and influenced by the theosophical perception of human races as “stages”
in human evolution. According to Swiney, only monogamous relation-
ships as the natural form of relation between man and woman—when
obeying to natural pauses of sexual intercourse of three to five years after
each childbirth—could lead the way back to racial purity and spiritual
progress.
As Professor of Philosophy and Religion William Garrett has stated:
Even though Swiney “was an influential and prolific writer on women’s
rights,” she “is little-known today except among historians.”5 This is a

2
A. J. R, ed., Suffrage Annual and Women’s Who’s Who (London: Stanley Paul, 1913),
372; The Gloucestershire Echo, “Death of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney: Famous Champion of
Her Sex,” May 4, 1922, 3.
3
Frances Swiney, The League of Isis: Rules (Cheltenham: League of Isis, 1910).
4
Even though Swiney is concerned with the degeneration of the “British race” in particu-
lar, as I will show in the part concerning eugenics, Swiney never engages with the question
of “racial purity” in the sense of interracial mixing, as other eugenicists then did.
5
William Garrett, ed., Marie Stopes: Feminist Eroticist, Eugenicist (San Francisco: Kenon
Books, 2007), xxxvii.
 2 MRS. ROSA FRANCES SWINEY: IMPERIAL FEMINISM AND EUGENICS… 23

striking fact, since in her time, she was praised “for all she has done for
women.”6 It was even said, that it was impossible “to set a value to her
work for women.”7 As her obituary stated: her “many works on various
phases of the feminist problem (…) made her name known in all parts of
the world amongst those who have this subject at heart.”8 Nevertheless,
scholarship in the history of esotericism or the Theosophical Society sees
Swiney as a marginal figure, her writing as not representative for feminist
theosophists and her relationship with the Theosophical Society is said to
have been “a troubled one.”9 However, as historian Joy Dixon has pointed
out, reacting to her critics, Swiney took a stand against theosophy’s mas-
culine bias, which, according to her, had led the society astray.10 Swiney
was by far not the only theosophist believing in the Divine Feminine
instead of the Hermaphrodite as the sexless being in which humans will
evolve in the next steps of evolution. I maintain that a focus on the hege-
monic voices within the Theosophical Society, such as H. P. Blavatsky,
Annie Besant and their male contemporaries, has led to an exclusion of
female voices such as Frances Swiney’s in the recordings of the history of
the society as well as in the current scholarship. By re-contextualizing
Swiney’s work in the feminist and eugenic discourses of her time, it will be
possible to see that her ideas were not unusual at all, but rather represent
the voice of an established feminist woman.

Entangled in the Empire

Rosa Frances Emily Swiney [née Biggs] was born and married into an
upper middle-class family. At the time of her birth on April 21, 1847, her
father, John Biggs, was Major of the 8th Foot and afterwards of the 4th
Royal Dragoon, stationed in India. He was a member of a “well-known”
Anglo-Irish family with connections to the noble family of Warwickshire
on the maternal side, as well as a direct descendent of Sir Isaac Newton’s

6
The Gloucestershire Echo, “Death of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney,” 3.
7
The Cheltenham Looker-On, “A Cheltenham Leader of the Women’s Movement,”
February 7, 1920, 18.
8
The Gloucestershire Echo, “Death of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney,” 3.
9
Siv-Ellen Kraft, “The Sex Problem: Political Aspects of Gender Discourse in the
Theosophical Society 1875–1930” (PhD diss., University of Bergen, 1999), 40; Joy Dixon,
Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2003), 168.
10
Dixon, Divine Feminine, 168.
24 J. A. ALBRECHT

sister on the paternal side.11 After being born in Poonah, India, Frances
spent her childhood mostly in Ireland, where, according to her obituary in
the Gloucestershire Echo, “early manifestations of her great intellectual abil-
ity” already became apparent in her paintings.12 Swiney was home edu-
cated, with an emphasis on art, by her tutor, the son of the famous painter
Francis Danby. She drew numerous pictures of Indian sceneries which
won prizes at exhibitions in Birmingham and Madras, demonstrating her
permanent imperial entanglements.13 On June 15, 1871, she married
John Swiney (1832–1918), then Major of the Madras Staff Corps and
later Major General, who was a member of “the old Swineys of Donegal,”
a “famous Irish stock,” and the son of General George Swiney.14 They
married at the Trinity Church in Paddington, London, the officiating cler-
gymen being her uncle Rev. Hesleeth Biggs and a relative of her then
husband, Rev. A. Swiney.15 Their wedding was reported on in several
newspapers which celebrated the beautiful bride, her dress and her guests’
clothing, the Worchester Echo commenting: “The Church was crowded
with spectators, the bride being so pretty and universally popular that it
was no mere compliment to call her the ‘beautiful and accomplished’.”16
Even though she wanted to be a professional painter, the increasing
responsibilities of the first six years of marriage and a young family life in
India imposed a barrier.17 Swiney gave birth to six children, four boys and
two girls, one of which died as a child.18 In 1877, Swiney arrived in
Cheltenham with her three children at that time to send them to school in
England.19 Such a move was not uncommon for families who did not
settle in India permanently, as army officers’ families like Col. Swiney’s.
Traveling due to long-term residences overseas, interrupted by furloughs

11
The Gloucestershire Echo, “Death of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney,” 3.
12
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
The Gloucestershire Echo, “Death of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney,” 3; Cheltenham Looker-On,
“News from the Newspapers,” June 17, 1871, 380.
15
Cheltenham Looker-On, “News from the Newspapers,” 380.
16
The Worcester Herald, “Local Intelligence,” June 24, 1871, 3.
17
The Gloucestershire Echo, “Death of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney,” 3.
18
The Gloucestershire Echo, “Cheltenham and County,” May 18, 1918, 4; Canterbury
Journal, Kentish Times and Farmers’ Gazette, “Births,” January 1873; Cheltenham Chronicle,
“Births,” February 1874, 2. Their first son, Gilbert M. Swiney was born in Madras, in
January 1873, as well as the second son, Hesketh Swiney, in February 1874. Sydney Swiney,
their third son was probably also born in India.
19
Cheltenham Chronicle, “Arrivals, Departures, and Removals,” January 16, 1877, 2.
 2 MRS. ROSA FRANCES SWINEY: IMPERIAL FEMINISM AND EUGENICS… 25

and retirements in England was a central part of their identities.20 These

families were advised to send their children back to England for schooling
to avoid any harm by staying in India through climatic changes or “cul-
tural contamination.”21 Therefore, any family who could afford to do so
sent their children “home.”22 Swiney left Madras together with her three
children, which was relatively unusual—most wives stayed in India with
their husbands.23 However, this is of no surprise, since a fulfilling experi-
ence of motherhood, including spending time with one’s children was
central to Swiney’s definition of womanhood. Families like the Swineys
tried to establish their own communities, overseas as well as “back in
Britain.”24 Cheltenham was one of these centers; it became known to be a
place for those who had worked in the colonial service to retire or to visit
during furlough. Furthermore, Cheltenham College was well-known
among British-Indian parents.25 Col. Swiney, who had started his career in
1850 when he was appointed to the 32nd Madras Naval Infantry, joined
the family nine years later, in 1886.26 He officially retired in 1890.27
Frances Swiney’s family was no doubt highly influenced by the politics of
the British Empire and can even count as an example for an imperially
entangled upper middle-class family in the Victorian era.

20
Elisabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 2–3.
21
Buettner, Empire Families, 9.
22
Ibid., 9.
23
Ibid., 6.
24
Ibid., 16 and 18.
25
Edward Scot, ed., Cheltenham College Register 1841–1927 (Cheltenham: Cheltenham
College, 1928); The Gloucestershire Echo, “Cheltenham and County,” 4. Col. Swiney himself
was born in Cheltenham and went to the College as a day boy from 1841 to 1848. His father
and his uncle, John Swiney, were two of the first directors of the college. As Buettner exam-
ines in Empire Families, Cheltenham College and similar schools ‘not only attracted a sub-
stantial imperial clientele but also played central roles in perpetuating this identity into the
next generation by training their pupils for imperial careers’ (18).
26
He had visited the family in 1879, when he was granted furlough for 14 months on
medical certificate. Their fourth son, Arundel Swiney, was born in 1881, followed by their
surviving daughter, Gladys Swiney, in 1887.
27
The Gloucestershire Echo, “Cheltenham and County,” 4; Cheltenham College Register
1841–1927; Edward Scot, ed., Cheltenham College Register 1841–1927 (Cheltenham:
Cheltenham College, 1928); The Gloucestershire Echo, “Death of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney,”
3. His sons followed in his footsteps; all of them went to Cheltenham College as Day Boys.
Afterwards, the first two served in India, the third in Australia, and the last one became a
Reverend, like his great-uncle, and then Naval Chaplain.
26 J. A. ALBRECHT

Unlike her husband, who did not partake in political affairs, Swiney
started to play an active role in politics and public affairs from 1890
onwards.28 It is often said that the retirement of her husband and the time
she then gained were the reason for this change. However, in light of her
feminist ideas, it rather looks like she had by then finished lactating and
full-time watching her youngest daughter. According to Swiney, in this
time there was no other occupation in which a mother should partake.

The Natural Law of Isis the Mother

For the soul is the feminine creative principle in man (…). The feminine is
therefore the inner nature of man, and woman (…), the objective represen-
tative of the Divine Feminine.29

Swiney, who became a member of the Theosophical Society in 1898,

was from time to time criticized by either her feminist contemporaries or
her fellow theosophists. However, those who shared her beliefs, as did
many women at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twen-
tieth century who searched for female empowerment outside of patriar-
chal Christianity, highly valued her works on the evolution of the human
race and the crucial part women played in it.30 However, instead of adapt-
ing the general teachings of the founder of the Theosophical Society,

28
Swiney became a prominent local feminist and leader of various suffrage movements. She
also participated in national and international meetings and established a network of feminist
contacts. For a detailed account on Swiney’s local participation, see: Sue Jones, Votes for
Women: Cheltenham and the Cotswolds (Stroud: The History Press, 2018).
29
Frances Swiney, The Esoteric Teachings of the Gnostics, 21.
30
For the interrelation of feminism and religion, see: Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beas:
Feminism, Sex and Morality (London: Tauris, 2001); Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and
Motherhood in Western Europe 1890–1970: The Maternal Dilemma (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005); Diana Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in
Victorian Literature and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1992); Sheila
Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London:
Pandora Press, 1985); Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s
Emancipation, England 1830–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). For
the important role theosophy played as an alternative for women, see: Diana Burfield,
“Theosophy and Feminism: Some Exploration in Nineteenth Century Biography,” in
Women’s Religious Experience, edited by Pat Holden (Kent: Croom Helm, 1983), 27–56;
Dixon, Divine Feminine; Kraft, “The Sex Problem”; Robert Ellwood and Catherine
Wessinger, “The Feminism of ‘Universal Brotherhood’: Women in the Theosophical
Movement,” in Women’s Leadership in Marginal Religions: Explorations Outside the
 2 MRS. ROSA FRANCES SWINEY: IMPERIAL FEMINISM AND EUGENICS… 27

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), Swiney used the image of the

goddess Isis as the mother of All for her own cosmology and developed a
feminist path of human evolution. In doing so, she combined theosophi-
cal teachings by Blavatsky as Swiney read them in Isis Unveiled (1877),
with Isis worship found in the works by MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918).31
She then legitimized these esoteric teachings with current biological find-
ings of the female origins in nature and in procreation and utilized them
for her feminist argument.
Humans, instead of ascending into a sexless Higher Self, the Divine
Hermaphrodite, and becoming part of the formless Universal Divine
Principle, as it was taught by Blavatsky and others, would, according to
Swiney, ascend into the Divine Feminine. For Swiney, evolution meant the
“physical, moral, social, and spiritual progress of the Universe; it is the
unfolding of the invariable laws upon which the whole Creation is based.”32
Feminism and with it the end of women’s material and spiritual subjuga-
tion to men are seen as inevitable steps in the evolution of humankind.
The concept of evolution is central to all of Swiney’s works. In The Mystery
of the Circle and the Cross (1908), she further developed this argument and
described the evolutionary cosmic process of life. Paralleling biological
evolution with spiritual evolution is one of the central themes in theo-
sophical thought. In her first major work, Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky stated
that modern science ignores this—higher—spiritual evolution, but that
there is an impulse to take a higher form in any kind of matter and spirit.33
Swiney wanted to explain why there is maleness and femaleness in the
world and why women are subjected to men. In The Mystery of the Circle
and the Cross she related this to the cosmic process (Fig. 2.1):
The circle of life starts off with the cosmic circle and center of life (1),
which was, according to Swiney, the first known symbol in the world. It is
the Ovid Circle, the emblem of the Mother, illustrating that all life begins
as female. The First Cross is the symbol of creation (2). It is when the first

Mainstream, edited by Catherine Wessinger (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,

1993), 68–87.
31
For the reception of the goddess Isis in nineteenth century occultism, see: Alex Owen,
The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 2004).
32
Frances Swiney, The Awakening of Women Or Woman’s Part in Evolution (London:
George Redway, 1899), 18.
33
H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern
Science and Theology (New York: J. W. Bouton, 1877), xxx.
28 J. A. ALBRECHT

Fig. 2.1 (a,b) Cosmic Process of male and female and stages of humanity,
explained by cosmological symbols in The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross (1908)
Swiney, Frances. The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross, London: Open Road
Publications, 1908

life was produced, still female and existing alone. The Male Cross, or the
Cross of Negation (3), stands for the fertilizer, which the female mother—
the actual fertile sex—has produced for herself. It then becomes the Bar of
Isis, the first Union of the circle and the cross (4). The circle is above, the
cross below, therefore, the horizontal line which stands for the male cross
is the bar: “The Male is under the Law of the Mother.”34 This is the state
of the first fertilization, which, as Swiney emphasized, is not reproduction
or a life-giving process, because that has already happened before without
the male (2). In the next step, the world is under the Law of the Mother,
symbolized by the Sistrum of Isis (5). It shows the “times of the mother”;

34
Frances Swiney, The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross (London: Open Road Publishing,
1908), 12.
 2 MRS. ROSA FRANCES SWINEY: IMPERIAL FEMINISM AND EUGENICS… 29

the time when a couple should live chaste, when the womb is closed after
conception, during degustation, and the time of lactation. This is sup-
posed to be the Natural Law, when the “male cross is the symbol of the
male’s self-sacrifice. He has to give up his own will, instinct, or inclination
to the will or command of the Mother of all living.”35 When man started
to practice sexual excess and woman lost her power for selection—that is
when “the race began to degenerate.”36 This is portrayed in the Symbol of
the Male or the Unit (6). The straight line symbolizes the male organ, but
“from a straight line nothing can proceed. (…) It is absolutely negative,
for it begins in nothing and ends in nothing.”37 However, even this stage
is necessary in the cosmic development because the Unit must be sepa-
rated from the Whole before it can be reunited with the Circle of
Immortality, the One in Two (7). Since it is a duality and not unity, evil
proceeds in this stadium. Finally, in the Perfect Circle and the Cross of
Glory, the apotheosis of the male happens; then, it enters the Mother. The
Bar of Negation (6) is still visible, but it is no longer negative, but positive
and creative. It represents Unity, Wholeness, and Harmony: “The
Masculine Cross is no more. The Unit is within the Circle, one with it in
the All of All. The universe is perfected.”38
In her cosmogenesis, Swiney combined the theosophical cosmogenesis,
in particular the symbols used by Blavatsky, with the works by spiritualist
and Egyptologist Gerald Massey (1828–1907), sociologist Lester F. Ward
(1841–1913) and current scholarship by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur
Thompson, The Evolution of Sex (1890). However, she managed to turn
their arguments around and utilize them for her specific feminist argu-
ment: her version of the Divine Feminine Principle. Swiney drew the idea
of the Feminine Principle in Semitic religions as the basic source of all life
from MacGregor Mathers (1854–1918) Kabbalah Unveiled. It encour-
aged her to look for it in other religions as well.39 Referring to him, Swiney
saw the Kabbalah not as an unauthorized version of the Bible, but as
the purified Semitic religion, in which Elohim is recognized to be the

35
Swiney, 43–45.
36
Swiney, 45.
37
Swiney, 50.
38
Swiney, 63.
39
Frances Swiney, The Cosmic Procession, Or the Feminine Principle in Evolution (London:
Ernest Bell, 1906), vii and 230.
30 J. A. ALBRECHT

Divine Feminine.40 The Mother was the origin of the Father and the
Son—the masculine is, accordingly, only an intermediate phase of life.41
Adapting Mathers’ interpretation, Swiney equalized Isis with the Semitic
Mother goddess.42
Combining all of these works, Swiney developed her idea of the Bar of
Isis and later called her own society the League of Isis. In this as well as her
esoteric writings in general, she wanted to overcome the perceived bound-
aries between religion and science which had emerged in the nineteenth
century. Science rose to “dominance in truth-telling authority.”43 It
claimed to explain supernatural phenomena with empirical methods.44
However, the boundaries between science and religion were controversial
from the beginning. Many perceived this differentiation of a scientific
materialist and a religious spiritual understanding of the world as unsatis-
factory and tried to defend belief against materialism.45 Esotericism, in
particular, tried to transgress these boundaries. Swiney distinctively aimed
at combining religion and science in her work:

Religion and science should, then, be in accord and complementary to each

other. (…) The natural law cannot differ from the spiritual, and there is no
ground for antagonism if the cosmic law of correspondence is fully under-
stood with the essential oneness underlying all manifestation.46

Swiney’s first major work, The Awakening of Women is also her most
read and widely reviewed book. Every newspaper article dealing with
Swiney gives credit to The Awakening of Women; it went through three
40
For more on Swiney’s remarks on the femaleness of the Christian God and her interpre-
tation of Gnosticism, see: Jessica Albrecht, “The Divine Feminine and Pistis Sophia.
Motherhood, Sexuality, and Theosophical Gnosticism in Frances Swiney’s Feminism,” La
Rosa Di Paracelso, no. 1–2 (2018): 123–138.
41
Swiney, “The Maternity of God,” Westminster Review 165, no. 5 (1906): 560–561.
42
Swiney, 588.
43
J. Jeffrey Franklin, Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of
Faith in Victorian Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 1.
44
Michael Bergunder, “‘Religion’ and ‘Science’ Within a Global Religious History,” Aries
16, no. 1 (2016): 118.
45
Bergunder, “‘Religion’ and ‘Science,’” 117; Franklin, Spirit Matters, ix. See also:
Michael Bergunder, “What Is Esotericism? Cultural Studies Approaches and the Problems of
Definition in Religious Studies,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 22, no. 1 (2010):
9–36; Egil Asprem, The Problem of Disenchantment: Scientific Naturalism and Esoteric
Discourse, 1900–1939 (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2014).
46
Frances Swiney, Sublime Feminism (Cheltenham: League of Isis, n.d.).
 2 MRS. ROSA FRANCES SWINEY: IMPERIAL FEMINISM AND EUGENICS… 31

editions and was revised and enlarged over the next ten years and received
a wide international readership. The Woman’s Tribune USA called it “the
most philosophical and thoughtful contribution to the woman’s move-
ment which has yet been issued.”47 Being translated into Dutch in 1902
by Martina G. Kramers, a fellow feminist, with an introduction written by
Swiney herself, her work also reached Dutch theosophists. In the Dutch
translation, Kramers, a socialist and non-religious person herself, did not
comment on Swiney’s religious argumentations. Nevertheless, Dutch
reviewers, especially other evolutionist feminists, criticized the religious
framework. Dutch theosophical feminists, however, approved of the
“underlying theosophical premises,” namely the spiritual evolution which
would result in women’s liberation.48
As said before, Swiney’s emphasis on the Divine Feminine contradicts
with the concept of the Divine Hermaphrodite. This is why historian of
religion Joy Dixon argues that Swiney was an exceptional figure who had
a “troubled relationship” with the Theosophical Society.49 Indeed, The
Theosophical Review criticized The Awakening of Women as “imbalanced
and injudicious,” “imperfect and unripe,” and the reviewer, Bertram
Keightly, feared that a “great and good cause” had been irretrievably dam-
aged by Swiney.50 However, Swiney’s following works were positively
reviewed by fellow theosophists. The Occult Review acknowledged
Swiney’s combination of symbolism and biology in The Mystery of the
Circle and the Cross; The Theosophical Review commented that The Cosmic
Procession shows that Swiney does excellent work for both causes, the
women’s movement and Theosophy.51 Over the years, Swiney became
more and more drawn to Theosophy and she remained a member until
her death. Instead of a “troubled relationship,” I see an unacknowledged
feminist theosophical teaching on the Divine Feminine which contradicts
with the teaching on the Divine Hermaphrodite which is seen as the

47
The Woman’s Tribune, quoted in Frances Swiney, The Cosmic Procession Or the Feminine
Principle in Evolution (London: Ernest Bell, 1906).
48
Fia Dieteren, “Kuisheid Omwille van de Vooruitgang. De Alternatieve Evolutieleer van
Frances Swiney,” Strijd Om Seksualiteit, 20 (2000):134, 143, and 147.
49
Dixon, Divine Feminine, 168.
50
B. K., Review of The Awakening of Women by Frances Swiney, Theosophical Review (June
1899): 381.
51
Arthur Edward Waite, Review of The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross by Frances
Swiney, Occult Review 25 (February 1917): 60; A. R. O., “Woman Leading On,” The
Theosophical Review 39, no. 233 (January 1907): 476.
32 J. A. ALBRECHT

mainstream. The unity in the duality (of the sexes), however, was not the
major reason for feminists to become theosophists, as Joy Dixon has
argued. Swiney, and others as well, were strongly opposed to the idea of a
duality and interpreted Blavatsky’s cosmogenesis in a way that favored the
feminine principle as the beginning and the end, and as superior to the
masculine.52 They argued for the acknowledgment of the relationship
between woman’s suffrage and the Feminine Principle. They contended
that the new phase of humankind would be a phase of unity, of re-uniting
with the Feminine Principle.53 After all, according to Blavatsky, the first
emanation of the Absolute was the Divine Mother.54 Swiney’s emphasis on
the Feminine Principle might have contradicted mainstream theosophical
thought. Nevertheless, other theosophical feminist positively engaged
with her work and supported her argument.55

Divine Motherhood, Race and Eugenics

To woman was committed ‘the preservation of life, the conservation of type,
the purity of the race.’56

It was not only through her writing that Swiney became internationally
known. Her 1909 or 1910 founded League of Isis had local secretaries in
New York, South Africa, and India by 1912. It was open to new branches
and members of all nationalities who were “willing to conform to the
Rules” which could only be altered after submitting suggestions first to
the Central Branch in Cheltenham.57 “Each branch [should] enlist lectur-
ers, hold public meetings, and distribute literature, and thus push the
reform movement to the widest extent.58 Unfortunately, it is hard to trace

52
Swiney, The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross, 13.
53
O., “Woman Leading on,” 476.
54
H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1888), 4.
55
Swiney also influenced other feminist esoteric groups, such as the Panacea Society,
founded by Mabel Barltrop, Octavia. After the Leadbeater crisis, many women left the
Theosophical Society and joined the Panacea Society in the 1920s. When Ellen Oliver, a
friend of Octavia searched for evidence for the belief in a female savior, Octavia sent her
Swiney’s The Awakening of Women. Since reading this she believed in women’s evolutionary
superiority which is portrayed in a female Messiah, herself. See letter from Oliver to Barltrop,
4 November 1918, The Panacea Charitable Trust.
56
Swiney, The Awakening of Women, 85.
57
Swiney, The League of Isis: Rules.
58
Swiney.
 2 MRS. ROSA FRANCES SWINEY: IMPERIAL FEMINISM AND EUGENICS… 33

the League of Isis. No membership lists or minutes of meetings have sur-

vived; however, there are many pamphlets and books written by Swiney
and other occult eugenicists published by the League.
As early as 1896, Swiney’s imperial and racial feminism becomes visible.
In this year she published her first book, The Plea for Disenfranchised
Women, which was distributed with 4000 copies by the WEU.59 As with
most of Swiney’s other smaller pieces, scholarship has failed to acknowl-
edge this as being one of her important works. It coincided with the
Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897; Swiney argued that in the
light of being governed by a female sovereign for sixty years “under whose
beneficent sway the whole nation has increased and prospered,” and in the
light of progress and keeping up with Britain’s colonies, women should
finally get the vote.60 Directly addressing Queen Victoria in her plea,
Swiney stated that the gift of enfranchisement should be granted to all
British women who, in their diverse ways, had “contributed to the devel-
opment and advancement of the English Race.”61
As this illustrates, Swiney’s feminist argument rests in the differentia-
tion of the sexes. At the time, the sexual difference was an ontology which
was impossible to dismiss, since sexual difference was perceived as natural.
Therefore, feminists had to argue on these grounds.62 Swiney’s main argu-
ment rested on the basis of the “natural,” heterosexual, and monogamous
family in which husband and wife together bring humankind back on the
path of purity and sexual morality.63 For her, womanhood meant fulfilling
one’s duty as a wife and mother, her duty as a citizen to save the British
race, which should then result in woman’s franchise. Swiney was one of
the so-called “social-purity feminists,” who believed that in an ideal soci-
ety, a couple should live in a monogamous marriage and enter marriage
chaste. Furthermore, a high degree of continence even within marriage
should be practiced.64 Those feminists, as well as many biologists saw the

59
The Gloucestershire Echo, “Death of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney,” 3.
60
Frances Swiney, The Plea of Disenfranchised Women (Cheltenham: Shenton, 1896),
1 and 4.
61
Swiney, 4.
62
Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987).
63
Swiney, The Awakening of Women, 56–57 and 118.
64
Lesley A. Hall, “Suffrage, Sex and Science,” in The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New
Feminist Perspectives, edited by Maroula Joannou and June Purvis (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1998), 189.
Another random document with
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The Rabbi Ishmael, according to this book, received in addition
these particulars from the lips of Enoch. He was carried to heaven in
a chariot of fire by horses of fire; and when he entered into the
presence of God, the Sacred Beasts, the Seraphim, the Osannim,
the Cherubim, the wheels of the chariot, and all the fiery ministers
recoiled five thousand three hundred and eighty miles at the smell of
him, and cried aloud, “What a stink is come among us from one born
of a woman! Why is one who has eaten of white wheat admitted into
heaven?”
Then the Almighty answered and said, “My servants, Cherubim and
Seraphim, do not be grieved, for all my sons have rejected my
sovereignty and adore idols, this man alone excepted; and in reward
I exalt him to principality over the angels in heaven.” When Enoch
heard this he was glad, for he had been a simple shoemaker on
earth; but this had he done, at every stitch he had said, “The name
of God and His Majesty be praised.”
The height of Enoch when a chief angel was very great. It would take
a man five hundred years to walk from his heel to the crown of his
head. And the ladder which Jacob saw in vision was the ladder of
Metatron.[158] The same authority, above quoted, the Rabbi Ishmael,
is reported to have had the exact measure of Enoch from his own
lips; it was seven hundred thousand times thousand miles in length
and in breadth.[159]
The account in the Targum of Palestine is simply this. “Enoch served
in the truth before the Lord; and behold, he was not with the
sojourners of the earth; for he was withdrawn, and he ascended to
the firmament by the Word before the Lord, and his name was called
Metatron, the Great Saphra.”[160]
Whether the Annakos, or Nannakos of whom Suidas wrote, is to be
identified with Enoch, I do not venture to decide. Suidas says that
Nannak was an aged king before Deucalion (Noah), and that,
foreseeing the Deluge, he called all his subjects together into the
temple to pray the gods with many tears to remit the evil.[161] And
Stephanos, the Byzantine lexicographer, says that Annakos lived at
Iconium in Phrygia, and that to weep for Annak, became a proverb.
 XI.
THE GIANTS.

The Giants, say the Cabbalists, arose thus.

Aza and Azael, two angels of God, complained to the Most High at
the creation of man, and said, “Why hast Thou made man who will
anger Thee?”
But God answered, “And you, O angels, if you were in the lower
world, you, too, would sin.” And He sent them on earth, and then
they fell, as says the Book of Genesis, “And it came to pass that the
sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they
took them wives of all which they chose.” After they had sinned, they
were given bodies of flesh; for an angel who spends seven days on
earth becomes opaque and substantial. And when they had been
clothed with flesh and with a corrupt nature, then they spake the
word “Shem hamphorasch,” and sought to regain their former place,
but could not; and were cast out into mountains, there to dwell. From
these angels descend the sons of the giants and the Anakim, and
from their seed also spring the devils.[162] The Rabbi Eliezer says that
the giants sprang from the union of the angels with the daughters of
Cain, who walked about in immodest clothing and cast their eyes
around with bold glances. And the book Zeena-ureena, in the
Parascha Chykkath, says that Og sprang from this connection, and
that Sammael, the angel, was the parent of Og, but that Sihon was
the son of the same angel who deceived the wife of Ham when she
was about to enter the ark.[163]
The account in the Book of Enoch is as follows:—
“Hear and fear not, Enoch, thou righteous man, and writer of
righteousness, come hither and hear my words: Go speak unto the
Watchers of Heaven, and say unto them, Ye shall pray for men and
not men for you. Why have ye forsaken the high and holy and
eternal heaven, and have joined yourselves to women, and polluted
yourselves with the daughters of men, and have taken to you wives,
and have become the fathers of a giant race? Ye, who were spiritual,
holy, and enjoying eternal life, have corrupted yourselves with
women, and have become parents of children with flesh and blood;
lusting after the blood of men, ye have brought forth flesh and blood,
like those who are mortal and perishable. Because men die,
therefore did I give unto them wives, that they might have sons, and
perpetuate their generation. But ye are spiritual and in the enjoyment
of eternal life. Therefore gave I not to you wives, for heaven is the
abode of the spirits. And now the giants, who are born of flesh and
blood, shall become evil spirits, and their dwelling shall be on the
earth. Bad beings shall proceed from them. Because they have been
generated from above, from the holy Watchers have they received
their origin, therefore shall they be evil spirits on the earth, and evil
spirits shall they be called. And the spirits of the giants, which mount
upon the clouds, will fail and be cast down, and do violence, and
cause ruin on the earth and injury; they shall not eat, they shall not
thirst, and they shall be invisible.”[164]
Among the Oriental Christians it is said, that Adam having related to
the children of Seth the delights of Paradise, several of them desired
to recover the lost possession. They retired to Mount Hermon and
dwelt there in the fear of the Lord; living in great austerity, in hope
that their penitence would recover Eden. But the Canaanites dwelt
round them on all sides, and the sons of Seth, becoming tired of
celibacy, took the daughters of the Canaanites to wife, and to them
were born the giants.[165]
Others say that the posterity of the patriarch Seth were those called
the “Sons of God,” because they lived on Mount Hermon in familiar
discourse with the angels. On this mountain they fed only on the fruit
of the earth, and their sole oath was, “By the blood of Abel.”[166]
Among the giants was Surkrag, of whom we have already related a
few particulars. He was not of the race of men, nor of the posterity of
Adam. According to the Mussulman account he was commander of
the armies of Soliman Tchaghi, who reigned over the earth before
the time of Gian ben Gian, who succeeded him and reigned seven
thousand years. The whole earth was then in the power of the Jins.
Gian ben Gian erected the pyramids of Egypt.
Surkrag obeyed God, and followed the true religion, and would not
suffer his subject Jins to insult or maltreat the descendants of Adam.
He reigned on Mount Kaf, and allied himself, according to Persian
authorities, with Kaïumarth, the first king of the world, whom some
Persian writers identify with Adam, but others suppose to be the son
of Mahalaleel, and cotemporary with Enoch. Ferdusi, the author of
the Schah-Nâmeh, speaks of him as the first who wore a crown and
sat on a throne, and imposed a tribute on his subjects. He says that
this monarch lived a thousand years, and reigned five hundred and
fifty years. He was the first to teach men to build houses.
But if Kaïumarth was the first man to reign, he was the first also to
weary of it; for he abdicated his sovereignty and retired into his
former abode, a cave, after having surrendered his authority to his
son Siamek. Siamek having been killed, Kaïumarth re-ascended his
throne to revenge his death. After having recovered the body of his
son, he buried him with great honours, and kindled over his grave a
great fire, which was kept perpetually burning, and this originated the
worship of fire among the people of Iran.
Kaïumarth overcame the giant Semendoun, who had a hundred
arms; his son, Huschenk, also overcame a giant who had three
heads, mounted on an animal with twelve legs. This animal, named
Rakhsche, was found by him in the Dog Isle, or the New Continent,
and was born of the union of a crocodile and an hippopotamus, and
it fed on the flesh of serpents. Having mastered this beast, Huschenk
overcame the Mahisers, which have heads of fish and are of great
ferocity. After having extended his conquests to the extremities of the
earth, Huschenk was crushed to death by a mass of rock which the
giants, his mortal enemies, hurled against him.[167]
According to Tabari, Huschenk was the son of Kaïumarth, who was
the son of Mahalaleel. He was the first man to cut down trees and to
make boards, and fashion them into doors to close the entrance to
houses. He also discovered many precious stones, such as the
topaz and the jacinth. He reigned four hundred years.[168]
He was succeeded by Tahmourath, who taught men to saddle and
bridle horses; he was also the first man to write in Persian
characters; he figures as a great hero in Iranian fable. According to
the story in Persia, he was carried by the Simorg to the mountain of
Kaf. Now the Simorg is a wondrous bird, speaking all languages, and
eminently religious.
According to the Kaherman Nâmeh, the bird Simorg, being asked its
age, replied, “This world has been seven times peopled, and seven
times made void of living beings. The generation of Adam, in which
we now are, will last seven thousand years, which form a cycle, and I
have seen twelve of these revolutions. How many more I shall see is
unknown to me.”
The same book informs us that the Simorg was a great friend of the
race of Adam, and a great enemy to the demons and Jins. He knew
Adam personally, and had done obeisance to him, and enjoyed the
same religion as our first fathers. He foretold to Tahmourath all that
was to take place in the world, and plucking from his bosom some
feathers, he presented them to him, and from that time all great
captains and men of war wear feather crests.
Tahmourath having been transported by the bird to the mountains of
Kaf, he assisted the Peris, who were at war with the Jins. Argenk,
the giant, finding that the Peris were gaining the mastery, with the
assistance of Tahmourath, sent an embassy desiring peace; but the
ambassador, Imlain, abandoned the party of the Jins and assisted
Tahmourath to obtain complete mastery in the mountains of Kaf, and
to overcome not only the giant Argenk, but also Demrusch, a far
more terrible monster. Demrusch lived in a cavern guarding a vast
treasure, which he had amassed in Persia and India. He had also
carried off the Peri Mergian. Tahmourath slew Demrusch and
released Mergian.
According to the Persian story, Tahmourath was the first to cultivate
rice, and to nourish silk-worms in the province of Tabristan.[169]
To return to Tabari.
Djemschid was the brother of Tahmourath; he was the first man to
forge arms, and he is probably to be identified with Tubal-cain. He
introduced also the use of pigments, and he discovered pearls, and
also to dig for lime, vermilion, and quicksilver; he likewise
compounded scents, and cultivated flowers. He divided all men into
four classes,—soldiers, scribes, agriculturists, and artisans. At the
head of all he placed the learned, that they might guide the affairs of
men, and set them their tasks and instruct them in what they were to
do.
Then Djemschid asked the wise men, “What must a king do to
secure his throne?”
They answered, “He must reign in equity.”
Consequently, Djemschid instituted justice; and he sat the first day of
every month with his wise men, and ministered righteous judgments.
For seven hundred years he continued this practice; and in all that
time no rebellion broke out, no afflictions troubled him, nor was his
reign in any way menaced.
One day, whilst Djemschid was taking his siesta alone in his
chamber, Eblis entered by the window, and Djemschid asked, “Who
art thou?” Now he thought he was one of those who waited without
till he should come forth to administer justice. Eblis entered into
conversation with Djemschid, and said, “I am an angel, and I have
descended from heaven to give thee counsel.”
“What counsel dost thou offer?” asked the king.
Eblis replied, “Tell me, who art thou?”
He answered, “I am one of the sons of Adam.”
“Thou mistakest,” said the Evil One: “thou art not a man. Consider,
since thou hast reigned, has anything failed thee? Hast thou suffered
any affliction, any loss, any revolt? If thou wert a son of Adam,
sorrow would be thy lot. Nay, verily, thou art a god!”
“And what sign canst thou show me of my divinity?”
“I am an angel. Mortal man cannot behold an angel, and live.”
Then he vanished. Djemschid fell into the snare of pride.
Next day he caused a great fire to be lighted, and he called together
all men and said to them, “I am a god, worship me; I created heaven
above and earth beneath; and those that refuse to adore me shall be
consumed in the fire.”
Then from fear of him many obeyed; and the same hour revolt broke
out.
There was a man named Beyourasp who stirred up the people, and
led a great army against Djemschid, and overcame him, and took
from him his kingdom, and sawed the king asunder from the head to
the feet.[170]
 XII.
LAMECH.

“Methusael begat Lamech. And Lamech took unto him two wives:
the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah.
And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents,
and of such as have cattle. And his brother’s name was Jubal: he
was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ. And Zillah,
she also bare Tubal-cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and
iron: and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah. And Lamech said
unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech,
hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding,
and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged seven-fold,
truly Lamech seventy and seven-fold.”[171]
The speech of Lamech points to a tradition unrecorded in the Sacred
Text, with which the Israelites were probably well acquainted, and
which therefore did not need repetition; or else, there has been a
paragraph dropped out of the original text. The speech is sufficiently
mysterious to raise our curiosity. Whom had Lamech slain? and why
should Lamech be avenged?
The Targums throw no light on the passage, merely paraphrasing it,
without supplying the key to the speech of Lamech.[172] But Rabbinic
tradition is unanimous on its signification. The book Jasher says that
in those days men did not love to have children, therefore they gave
their wives drink to make them sterile. Zillah had taken this drink,
and she was barren till in her old age she bare Tubal-cain and
Naamah. Now Lamech became blind in his old age, and he was led
about by the boy Tubal-cain. Tubal-cain saw Cain in the distance,
and supposing from the horn on his forehead that he was a beast, he
said to his father, “Span thy bow and shoot!” Then the old man
discharged his arrow, and Cain fell dead.
But when he ascertained that he had slain his great ancestor, he
smote his hands together, and in so doing, by accident struck his son
and killed him. Therefore his wives were wroth and would have no
communication with him. But he appeased them with the words
recorded in Genesis.[173] The same story is told in the book of the
“Combat of Adam.”
Some Jewish writers adopt a tradition that Tubal-cain was not slain,
but was severely injured by his father; according to some, he was
lamed. Connecting this tradition with his name, a striking analogy
springs up between him and the Vulcan of classic antiquity, and the
Völundr of Norse mythology. Both were lame, both were forgers of
iron, and the names Vulcan and Völundr bear some affinity to Tubal-
cain; for, cutting off Tu, we have Balcain or Vulcan. A very learned
and exhaustive monograph on Völundr has been written by MM.
Depping and Michel.[174]
Tubal is said by Tabari to have discovered the art of fermenting the
juice of the grape, as well as that of music. Eblis deceived the young
man, who was full of gaiety, and taught him many things, amongst
others how to make wine. Tubal took grapes and crushed them, and
made must, and let it grow bitter. Then he took it and put it in a glass
jug. He made flutes, lutes, cymbals, and drums. When he began to
drink the wine he had made, he jumped and danced. All the sons of
Cain looked on, and, pleased with his merriment, they also drank
and played on the instruments Tubal had made.[175]
Naamah, the sister of Tubal-cain, became the wife of the devil
Schomron, by whom she became the mother of Asmodeus.[176]
 XIII.
METHUSELAH.

It is related that an angel appeared to Methuselah, who was then

aged five hundred years, and lived in the open air, and advised him
to build a house. The Patriarch asked how long he had to live.
“About five hundred years more,” answered the angel. “Then,” said
Methuselah, “it is not worth taking the trouble for so short a time.”[177]
“Methuselah,” says the Midrash, “was a thoroughly righteous man.
Every word that fell from his lips was superlatively perfect,
exhausting the praises of the Lord. He had learnt nine hundred
chapters of the Mischna. At his death a frightful thunder was heard,
and all beasts burst into tears. He was mourned seven days by men,
and therefore the outbreak of the Flood was postponed till the
mourning was over.”[178]
Eusebius says, “He lived longer than all who had preceded him. He,
according to all editions (of the LXX.), lived fifteen years after the
Deluge, but where he was preserved through it is uncertain.”[179]
But the general opinion of the Jews follows the Midrash. The Rabbi
Solomon says, he died seven days before the Flood; and the Pirke
of Rabbi Eliezer and the Jalkut confirm this opinion. He is said to
have pronounced three hundred and thirty parables to the honour of
the Most High. But the origin of this is to be traced to the Cabbalists,
who say that, by transposition of the letters of his name, the
anagram “He who prophesied in parables” can be read.[180]
He had a sword inscribed with the Schem hammphorasch (the
Incommunicable Name), and with it he succeeded in slaying a
thousand devils.[181]
 XIV.
NOAH

The earth being filled with violence, God resolved on its destruction,
but Noah, the just, He purposed to save alive.
On the words of Genesis, “All flesh had corrupted his way upon the
earth,” the Rabbi Johanan taught that not only was the race of men
utterly demoralized, but also all the races of animals.[182] Noah and
his family, and one pair of all the beasts of earth, were to be saved in
the ark, but of every clean beast seven were to enter in. Falsehood
hastened to the ark and asked to be admitted; Noah refused. “I admit
the animals only in pairs,” said he.
Then Falsehood went away in wrath, and met Injustice, who said—
“Why art thou so sad?”
“I have been refused admittance into the ark, for I am single,” said
Falsehood; “be thou my companion.”
“See, now,” answered Injustice, “I take no companionship without
prospect of gain.”
“Fear not,” said Falsehood, “I will spread the toils and thou shalt
have the booty.”
So they went together to the ark, and Noah was unable to refuse
them admission. And when the Flood was passed and the beasts
went forth out of the ark, Falsehood said angrily, “I have done my
work and have caused evil, but thou hast all the plunder; share with
me.”
“Thou fool!” answered Injustice, “dost thou forget the agreement?
Thine it is to spread the net, mine alone to take the spoil.”[183]
At the time of the Deluge the giants were not all drowned, for Og
planted his foot upon the fountains of the great deep, and with his
hands stopped the windows of heaven, or the water would have
risen over his head. The Rabbi Eliezer[184] said that the giants
exclaimed, when the Flood broke out, “If all the waters of the earth
be gathered together, they will only reach our waists; but if the
fountains of the great deep be broken up, we must stamp them down
again.” And this they did, but God made the waters boiling hot, and it
scalded them so that their flesh was boiled and fell off their bones.
[185]
But what became of Og in the Deluge we learn from the Talmud.
[186]
He went into the water along with a rhinoceros[187] beside the ark,
and clung to it; now the water round the ark was cold, but all the rest
was boiling hot. Thus he was saved alive, whereas the other giants
perished.
According to another authority, Og climbed on the roof of the ark;
and on Noah attempting to dislodge him, he swore that, if allowed to
remain there, he and his posterity would be the slaves of the sons of
Noah. Thereupon the patriarch yielded. He bored a hole in the side
of the vessel, and passed through it every day the food necessary
for the giant’s consumption.[188]
It is asserted by some Rabbinic writers that the Deluge did not
overflow the land of Israel, but was partial; some say the Holy Land
was alone left dry, and a rhinoceros had taken refuge on it and so
escaped being drowned. But others say that the land of Israel was
submerged, though all agree that the rhinoceros survived without
having entered the ark. And they explain the escape of the
rhinoceros in this manner. Its head was taken into the ark, and it
swam behind the vessel. Now the rhinoceros is a very large animal,
and could not be admitted into the ark lest it should swamp it. The
Rabbi Jannai says, he saw a young rhinoceros of a day old, and it
was as big as Mount Tabor; and Tabor’s dimensions are forty miles.
Its neck was three miles long, and its head half a mile. It dropped
dung, and the dung choked up Jordan. Other commentators object
that the head was too large to be admitted into the ark, and suppose
that only the tip of its nose was received. But as the ark swayed on
the waters, Noah tied the horn of the rhinoceros to the side of the
vessel, lest the beast’s nose should slip off in a lurch of the ark, and
so the creature perish.
All this is from the Talmud.
Let us now turn to some of the Mussulman legends of Noah. His
history is briefly related in the Koran, in the chapter entitled “Hud.”
“Noah built the ark with our assistance and that of the angels,
following the knowledge we revealed to him, and we said to him:
Speak no more in behalf of the sinners; they shall all be drowned.
“Whilst Noah was building his ark, all those who passed by mocked
him; but he said to them: Though you rail at me now, the time will
come when I shall rail at you; for you will learn to your cost, Who it is
that punishes the wicked in this world, and reserves for them a
further punishment in the world to come.”
In the annals of Eutychius of Alexandria, who wrote in Egypt in the
tenth century, and who probably quoted from apocryphal documents
now perished, we read that, before the Flood broke out, Noah made
a bell of plane wood, about five feet high, which he sounded every
day, morning, noon, and evening. When any one asked him why he
did so, he replied, “To warn you that God will send a deluge to
destroy you all.”
Eutychius adds some further particulars.
“Before they entered the ark,” says he, “Noah and his sons went to
the cave of Elcanuz, where lay the bodies of Adam, Seth, Cainan,
Mahalaleel, Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech. He kissed his dead
ancestors, and bore off the body of Adam together with precious
oblations. Shem bore gold; Ham took myrrh; and Japheth incense.
Having gone forth, as they descended the Holy Mount they lifted
their eyes to Paradise, which crowned it, and said, with tears,
‘Farewell! Holy Paradise, farewell!’ and they kissed the stones and
embraced the trees of the Holy Mount.”[189]
Ibn Abbas, one of the commentators on the Koran, adds, that Noah
being in doubt as to the shape he was to give to the ark, God
revealed to him that it was to be modelled on the plan of a bird’s
belly, and that it was to be constructed of teak wood. Noah planted
the tree, and in twenty years it grew to such a size that out of it he
was able to build the entire ark.[190]
To return to the Koran.
“When the time prescribed for the punishment of men was arrived,
and the oven began to boil and vomit, we said to Noah: Take and
bring into the ark two couples of every kind of animal, male and
female, with all your family, except him who has been condemned by
your mouth, and receive the faithful, and even the unbelievers; but
few only will enter.”
The interpreters of the Koran say that the ark was built in two years.
They give it the dimensions mentioned in Genesis:—three stages,
that on the top for the birds, the middle one for the men and the
provisions, whilst the beasts occupied the hold. The sign of the
outburst of the Flood was that water flowed out of the burning oven
of Noah’s wife. Then all the veins and arteries of the earth broke and
spirted out water. He who was excluded was Canaan, the son of
Ham, whom he had cursed. But Abulfeda says that it was Jam, a
fourth son of Noah, who was excluded from the ark.[191] The Persians
say that Ham incurred his father’s malediction as well, and, for that,
he and his posterity became black and were enslaved; but that
Noah, grieved for his son’s progeny, prayed God to have mercy on
them, and God made the slave to be loved and cherished by his
master.
The Koran says, “Noah having entered the ark with his wife (Noema,
daughter of Enoch, according to the Yaschar; Noria, according to the
Gnostics; Vesta, according to the Cabbalists), and his three sons,
Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and their wives, the three daughters of
Eliakim, son of Methuselah, he said to those who dwell on the earth,
‘Embark in the name of the Lord.’
“And whilst he thus spake, the ark advanced or halted, according to
his order, in the name of God.”
But the Yaschar says that the ungodly dwellers on the earth, finding
the Flood rising, hastened in such crowds to the ark, that they would
have overfilled it, had not the lions and other animals within
defended the entrance and repulsed them.[192]
According to some Oriental traditions, Noah embarked at Koufah;
according to others, near where Babylon was afterwards erected; but
some say in India; and some affirm that in the six months during
which the Deluge lasted, the ark made the circuit of the world.[193]
Noah, seeing that his grandson Canaan was not on board, called to
him, and said, “Embark, my child, and do not remain among the
ungodly.”
But Canaan replied, “I will ascend the mountains, and shall be safe
there.”
“Nothing can save thee to-day but the mercy of God,” said Noah.
Whilst thus speaking, a wave rushed between them and submerged
Canaan.
After forty days, the ark swam from one end of the earth to the other,
over the highest mountains. Over Mount Kubeis, chosen by God in
which to preserve the sacred black stone of the Kaaba, the ark
revolved seven times.[194]
Tabari says that Noah had four sons, and that of these Canaan was
the youngest, and that the three elder believed in his mission, but his
wife and Canaan laughed at his predictions. The animals that were
brought into the ark were collected and wafted to it by the wind.
When the ass was about to enter, Eblis (Satan) caught hold of its tail.
The ass came on slowly; Noah was impatient, and exclaimed, “You
cursed one, come in quick.”
When Eblis was within, Noah saw him, and said, “What right have
you in here?”
“I have entered at your invitation,” answered the Evil One. “You said,
‘Cursed one, come in;’ I am the accursed one.”
When six months had passed, the ark rested on the surface of the
water above Djondi,[195] and the rain ceased to fall, and God said to
the earth, “Suck in the water;” and to the sky, “Withhold thy rains.”
The water abated; and the ark lodged on the top of the mountain.
“There left the ark two sorts of animals which had not entered it—the
pig and the cat. These animals did not exist before the Deluge, and
God created them in the ark because it was full of filth and human
excrements, which caused a great stench. The persons in the ark,
not being able to endure any longer the smell, complained to Noah.
Then Noah passed his hand down the back of the elephant, and it
evacuated the pig. The pig ate all the dung which was in the ark, and
the stench was no more.
“Some time after the rats gave great annoyance. They ate the food,
and befouled what they did not eat. Then the voyagers went to
Noah, and said to him, You delivered us in our former difficulty, but
now we are plagued with rats, which gnaw our garments, eat our
victuals, and cover everything with their filth. Then Noah passed his
hand down the back of the lion, who sneezed, and the cat leaped out
of its nose. And the cat ate the rats.
“When Noah had left the ark, he passed forty days on the mountain,
till all the water had subsided into the sea. All the briny water that is
there is what remains from the Flood.
“Noah said to the raven, Go and place your foot on the earth and see
what is the depth of the water. The raven departed; but, having found
a carcase, it remained to devour it, and did not return. Noah was
provoked, and he cursed the raven, saying, May God make thee
contemptible among men, and let carrion be thy food!
“After that Noah sent forth the dove. The dove departed, and, without
tarrying, put her feet in the water. The water of the Flood scalded
and pickled the legs of the dove. It was hot and briny, and feathers
would not grow on her legs any more, and the skin scaled off. Now,
doves which have red and featherless legs are of the sort that Noah
sent forth. The dove returning showed her legs to Noah, who said,
May God render thee well-pleasing to men! For that reason the dove
is dear to men’s hearts.”[196]
Another version of the story is this. Noah blessed the dove, and
since then she has borne a neck-ring of green feathers; but the
raven, on the other hand, he cursed, that its flight should be crooked,
and never direct like that of other birds.[197] This is also a Jewish
legend.[198]
After that, Noah descended the mountain along with the eighty
persons who had been saved with him, and he found that not a
house was left standing on the face of the earth. Noah built a town
consisting of eighty houses,—a house apiece for all who had been
saved with him.[199]
Fabricius, in his collection of apocrypha of the Old Testament, has
published the prayer that Noah offered daily in the ark, beside the
body of Adam, which he bore with him, to bury it on Golgotha.
“O Lord, Thou art excellent in truth, and nothing is great beside
Thee; look upon us in mercy; deliver us from this deluge of water for
the sake of the pangs of Adam, the first man whom Thou didst make;
for the sake of the blood of Abel, the holy one; for the sake of just
Seth, in whom Thou didst delight; number us not amongst those who
have broken Thy commandments, but cover us with Thy protection,
for Thou art our deliverer, and to Thee alone are due the praises
uttered by the works of Thy hands from all eternity.” And all the
children of Noah responded, “Amen, O Lord.”[200]
Noah is said to have left the ark on the tenth day of the first month of
the Mussulman year, and to have instituted the fast which the
Mahommedans observe on that day, to thank God for his
deliverance.
According to the Book of Enoch, the water of the Flood was
transformed by God into fire, which will consume the world and the
ungodly, at the consummation of all things.[201]
The Targum of Palestine says that the dove plucked the leaf she
brought to Noah from off a tree on the Mount of Olives.[202]
The Book Jasher supplies an omission in Genesis. In Genesis it is
said of Lamech, on the birth of Noah, “He called his name Noah;
saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of
our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed;”[203]
but Noah signifies rest, not comfort. The Book Jasher says that
Methuselah called the child Noah, rest, because the land rested from
the curse; but Lamech called him Menahem, comfort, for the reason
given in the text of Genesis. The sacred writer has given one name
with the signification of the other.[204]
 XV.
HEATHEN LEGENDS OF THE DELUGE.

Ararat has borne this name for three thousand years. We read in the
Book of Genesis that “the ark rested, in the seventh month, on the
seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.” In
passages of the Old Testament, as in Isaiah xxxvii. 38 and 2 Kings
xix. 37, mention is made of a land, in Jeremiah li. 27 of a kingdom, of
Ararat; and we are likewise informed by Moses of Chorene, the first
authority among Armenian writers, that an entire country bore this
name after an ancient Armenian king, Arai the Fair, who lived about
1750 years before Christ. He fell in a bloody battle with the
Babylonians on a plain in Armenia, called after him Arai-Arat, the Fall
of Arai.
Before this event the country bore the name of Amasia, from its
sovereign, Amassis, the sixth in descent from Japheth, who gave the
name of Massis to the mountain. This is still the only name by which
it is known to the Armenians; for, though it is called Ararat in the
Armenian edition of the Old Testament, yet the people call it Massis,
and know no other name for it. The Mussulmans call it Agridagh, the
strong mountain. The name by which it is known to the Persians is
Kuhi-Nuh, the mountain of Noah, or Saad-dagh, the Blessed
Mountain.[205]
But tradition is not at one as to the peak on which the ark rested, or
from which Noah descended, as we shall presently see. Ararat is
17,210 feet in altitude above the sea, and 14,320 feet above the
plain of the Araxes. On the north-eastern slope of the mountain,
even from a distance, may be seen a deep, gloomy chasm, which
gives the appearance as if the mountain had been rent asunder at
the top: this was probably at some remote period the volcanic vent,
for the mountain is composed of tufa, scoria, and erupted matter. It
shoots up in one rigid crest, and then sweeps down towards Little
Ararat, the second summit, which stands 13,000 feet above the sea.
[206]

The people of the neighbourhood point to a step on the mountain

side, covered with perpetual snow and glacier, and where, say they,
the ark rested; and to a town near Ararat named Naktschiwan, or
“the first outgoing” of Noah from the ark. This etymological
interpretation is probably as questionable as that of Ararat given by
Moses of Chorene; it is true the city is ancient, for it was severely
injured by an earthquake in the reign of Astyages the Median, in the
sixth century before Christ. It is called Naxuana by Josephus,[207] and
he says it was so called because there Noah first descended from
the ark, and that remains of the ark were there to be seen carefully
preserved. And there, says the Armenian historian Vartan, is also the
tomb of Noah. Nicolas of Damascus, in his History of Syria, Berosus
the ancient Babylonian writer and other heathen historians, tell a
similar tale; and we learn that relics of the ark were distributed
thence, and were regarded with the utmost reverence, as amulets.
Nicolas of Damascus, who wrote in the reign of Augustus, says,
“There is beyond the Minyadian land a great mountain in Armenia,
Baris by name (perhaps for Masis), on which, as the tradition says,
some one sailing over it in an ark, lodged on the topmost peak. The
remains of the wood continued to exist long. Perhaps this may be
the same as he of whom Moses, the Jewish historian, has
written.”[208]
The story quoted by Eusebius from an ancient writer named Molo,
gives a form of the Syrian tradition. “After the Deluge, the man who
with his sons escaped the flood, went out of Armenia, after he had
been driven out of his inheritance by the violence of the natives. He
came thence into the mountains of Syria, which were then
uninhabited.”[209] And with this agrees a curious allusion in Lucian,
who was himself a Syrian. He says that there was in Syria, in the city
Hierapolis, a religious festival, and a very ancient temple, connected
“with the popular story of Deucalion the Scythian, who lived at the