Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney Agency and Impact of a Theosophical Feminist in the Imperial Discourse on Motherhood and Race Student Number: 2348231 Supervisor: Dr Tanya Cheadle Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Gender History Department of History Faculty of Arts University of Glasgow 7th September 2018 Table of Contents Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. iii Abstract ................................................................................................................................. v Abbreviations ....................................................................................................................... vi 1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1 2 ‘Mothers of the Race’ – Imperial Feminism ........................................................................ 8 3 ‘The Natural Law of Isis’ – Swiney’s Theosophy ..............................................................18 4 ‘A Famous Champion of Her Sex’? – The Controversies ...................................................31 5 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................40 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................43 ii Acknowledgements This dissertation marks the end of my year at the University of Glasgow and the course Gender History. Coming from another discipline as well as another country, I, first of all, want to thank all my lecturers, fellow students, and the university for making me feel welcome from the very first day. Especially, I thank my supervisor, Dr Tanya Cheadle, not only for her constant support and challenging conversations, but also for inspiring me with the topic of theosophical feminism in the first place. At this point, I want to acknowledge the impact studying comparative religion at the University of Heidelberg had on developing my interests in theory as well as the Theosophical Society, especially for the ongoing support of Prof Michael Bergunder. On my way to get to know Swiney, I received a lot of help from various sides. I want to thank Dr Maureen Wright for providing me with relevant sources concerning Wolstenholme Elmy. Furthermore, I am very grateful to the Panacea Society Trust for digitising a great number of important archival material, as well as sending a copy of Jane Shaw, Octavia, Daughter of God. I highly thank the LSE Women’s Library for preparing my requests on very short notice. I also want to acknowledge the help of the Cheltenham College Archives, the Dickinson College (Dr Annie Wood papers), the John Rylands Library (University of Manchester), and the Wellcome Library. Without my scholarship from the Deutscher Akademischer Auslandsdienst (DAAD) it would not have been possible for me to come to Scotland, thank you for your financial support as well as introducing me to many interesting people and new friends. Moreover, I want to thank my friends and family for always enduring my endless talks about the importance of Theosophy in the history of religions, especially Frank Seifferth who tried to, but could not convince me of the opposite. Lastly, I want to thank the person who continually inspired me, and without whom this dissertation would not be possible: Mrs. Frances Swiney. Thank you and your contemporaries for your efforts and not only for fighting for women’s enfranchisement, but for challenging the patriarchal structures and gender relations of your time. iii Figure 1: Frances Swiney, Cheltenham WSS speaking, April 1911 iv Abstract This dissertation examines the life and work of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney (1847-1922), the feminist, eugenicist, and Theosophist. It uses her example to illustrate the impact Theosophy had on Britain’s First Wave Feminism, as well as to examine how her own historical background in imperial Britain influenced her interpretations of Theosophical ideas and concepts. Therefore, this dissertation uses a biographical approach to analyse Swiney’s individual and gendered agency in the feminist and religious discourses of her time. It applies theories on the subject and its relation to its surrounding discourse to examine the possibilities and boundaries of Swiney’s agency, and, therefore, her impact on esotericism as well as British feminism. It concludes that Swiney’s feminism was not only strongly shaped by Theosophy; in addition, her interpretations of Theosophy were highly influenced by the contemporary imperial discourses on motherhood, reproduction, and race, which affected Britain’s First Wave Feminism. This dissertation will illustrate how these contexts made Swiney’s individual agency possible, but, at the same time, restricted her impact on either Theosophy or feminism. It argues that the influence alternative religious, or esoteric movements, such as the Theosophical Society had on contexts like British feminism cannot be understood without analysing the specific historical context which produced the theosophical feminist individual. Figure 2: Frances Swiney, 1902 v Abbreviations Cheltenham Women’s Suffrage Society International Women’s Suffrage Alliances National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies Theosophical Society Cheltenham WSS IWSA NUWSS TS Women’s Emancipation Union WEU Women’s Freedom League WFL Women’s Social and Political Union WSPU vi 1 Introduction 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 represent Frances Swiney’s (1847-1922) syncretistic theosophical feminist ideas. Since 1890, Swiney was a feminist activist, lecturer, and writer in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.2 She co-founded the Cheltenham Women’s Suffrage Society (Cheltenham WSS) in 1896; was Vice President of the Cheltenham Food Reform and Health Association; and lectured in organisations such as the Higher Thought Centre in London, Theosophical lodges, and Ethical Societies. Swiney was a member of the Theosophical Society (TS), the Sociological Society, the National Union of Women Workers (NUWW), the Eugenics Education Society, the Secular Education League, the Woman’s Freedom League (WFL), and the National Woman’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), as well as of the council of the Woman’s Branch of the International Neo-Malthusian League.3 In addition to her activism, she engaged in feminist debates through her writings. She regularly contributed to 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. Furthermore, Swiney published a series of books and pamphlets, such as The Awakening of Women and The Bar of Isis (1907). Since 1910, her books were copublished by the League of Isis, which she founded in 1909. The League of Isis aimed to bring about ‘the betterment of the Race, by individual observance of the Natural Law of reproduction (…) for the building up of the Higher Self’.4 This organisation, together with her writings, reflects a deep engagement in theosophical teachings: the belief in a spiritual evolution and in the Divine Mother (Isis), as well as the convincement that Theosophy can overcome the boundaries between science and religion. 1 Frances Swiney, The Esoteric Teaching of the Gnostics (London: Yellon, Williams & Co., 1909), pp. 12 and 21. 2 The Suffrage Annual and Women’s Who’s Who (London: Stanley Paul, 1913), p. 372; ‘Death of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney: Famous Champion of her Sex’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 4 May 1922, p. 3. 3 Ibid. 4 Frances Swiney, ‘The League of Isis: Rules’, in: Racial Problems No. 14: The Law of Organ and Function (London: C.W. Daniel, date unknown) 1 However, as William Garrett plainly states, even though Swiney ‘was an influential and prolific writer on women’s rights’, she ‘is little-known today except among historians’.5 This dissertation examines this contradiction. It stresses the importance of religion and spirituality; particularly the influence of alternative spiritualities, including Theosophy, had on conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality in the women’s rights movement, as worked out by Joy Dixon, Laura Schwartz, Diana Burfield, and Siv Ellen Kraft. It uses Swiney as an example for the possibility of an individual female agency in a religious, a scientific, and a feminist discourse. This dissertation is based on the academically widely accepted argument that the suffrage movement was not only concerned with women getting the vote, but rather resting upon a so called “sex war”. 6 According to Kent, the central goal of the Women’s Movement was the transformation of women’s lives through a redefinition and recreating of Britain’s sexual culture. Sexuality and politics, in contrast to First Wave feminism’s general perception, were not part of separate spheres, but thought of inseparable from one another.7 The topics of sex and sexuality permeated the social and feminist discourse and dominated the public debate.8 The discussions were centred on the connected issues of the double standard, which confirmed man’s sexual needs; and, thus, the necessity of prostitution, and venereal diseases which were widespread at that time.9 Feminists tried to break the silence around venereal diseases, a problem by itself. Many women (and men) were not adequately informed before entering marriage; venereal diseases were ‘frequently communicated to unsuspecting wives – doctors were reluctant to disturb marital harmony by indicating the nature of their malaise’.10 This resulted in high maternal and infant mortality rates.11 According to Hall, “social purity” feminists, like Swiney, whose model of an ideal society was centred around the monogamous marriage ‘in which both partners came to marriage chaste, and practiced a high degree of continence even within marriage’, and also the wider discourse of “sex reform” tried to replace the double standard by a new moral sexual standard.12 By the late nineteenth century, science 5 William Garrett (ed.), Marie Stopes: Feminist, Eroticist, Eugenicist: Essential Writings (San Francisco: Kenon Books, 2007), p. xxxvii. 6 See exemplarily on “sex war”: Susan Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 (London: Routledge, 1987). 7 Kent, p. 3f. 8 Kent, p. 22; Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 6. 9 Hall, p. 189. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Hall, p. 191. 2 claimed not only to explain the human body, but also to define and understand womanhood as such.13 Feminists had to argue on these grounds, as it becomes apparent in the following quote by Swiney: [Reproduction is] the threshold of the great mysteries of woman’s evolution, woman’s fall, and woman’s ascent.14 The male sexual urge was seen as powerful and inevitable, resulting in the contrary positions that it was necessary for men’s (and women’s) health or that there was a need for definite selfcontrol.15 There was a noticeable decline in the birth rate of the middle and upper classes, and this decline was perceived as biological. Consequently, the choice of one’s sexual partner was seen crucial to the future of the British nation.16 Two important societies in the discourse of sex reform, which Swiney joined, were the Malthusian League and the Eugenics Society; the former arguing in favour of contraception, the latter favouring the female choice of their sexual relations in order of the betterment of the British race.17 Another important historical context of First Wave Feminism was religion. Historian H. G. Cocks pointed out that there is a gap in the history of sexuality and feminism when it comes to religion and, especially, to esotericism. For him, religion, spirituality, and sexuality are interrelated forms of identities and possibilities of identification, which lie in the hearth of social and cultural trends.18 As Laura Schwartz demonstrates, the debate on whether religion or secularism offers a better guarantee of women’s rights has a long history in Britain. According to Lucy Bland, nineteenth century religion highly contributed to the ideological construction of (moral) womanhood.19 However, there were contrasting positions in the use of religion for supporting feminist and anti-feminist arguments. For Schwartz, the discourse of feminism and anti-feminism itself was integral to modern definitions of “secular” and “religious” in the 13 Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality (London: Tauris, 2001), p. 53. 14 Swiney, The Awakening of Women, p. 89. 15 Ibid., p. 54. 16 George Robb, ‘Race Motherhood: Moral Eugenics vs Progressive Eugenics, 1880-1920’, in: Claudia Nelson and Anna Summer Holmes (eds.), Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875-1925 (London: MacMillan, 1997), p. 58; Bland, p. 83. 17 Bland, pp. 189ff. 18 H. G. Cocks, ‘Religion and Spirituality’, in: M. Houlbrook and H. Cocks (eds.), Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (London: Palgrave, 2006), p. 158. 19 Bland, p. 48. 3 nineteenth century.20 Vice versa, religion was fundamental to feminist thought.21 On the one hand, many Christian denominations promoted the subordination of the wife to the husband. On the other hand, the “moralising” role which was seen in women, was used by feminists as a feminist argument.22 Schwartz argues that spirituality itself was a political site in and of itself, implicating that it was a distinctive discursive resistance within an encompassing religious discourse, since no matter if secularists renounced religion or religious feminists used it for their claims, ‘religion is conceptualised as the broad political terrain upon which different forms of feminism were constituted’.23 By using a biographical interdisciplinary approach and focussing on Frances Swiney as an individual, this dissertation will fill a historiographical gap. Even though a significant amount of work in historiography on the women’s rights movement acknowledge Swiney, at least locally, as an important figure, they label her as a Theosophist and her work as being theosophical; yet, they fail to analyse her connections to Theosophy. Due to its failure to acknowledge the important role of religion and spirituality in the feminist debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; in general, historiography of the women’s rights movement has not examined the influence of theosophical thought in Swiney’s feminist writing and activism.24 George Robb is the only scholar who critically examines and historicises Swiney’s works by contextualising them in the contemporary debates on eugenics, reproduction and sexuality.25 Robb recognises the influence of spiritualism and the occult on Swiney and states the attractiveness of occultism for feminists at that time.26 However, his articles do not illustrate 20 Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 1. 21 Ibid. 22 Bland, p. 52. 23 Schwartz, p. 92f. 24 See exemplarily: Lesley A. Hall, ‘Suffrage, Sex and Science’, in: Maroula Joannou and June Purvis (eds.), The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 188-200; Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930 (London: Routledge, 1985); Sue Jones, Votes for Women: Cheltenham and the Cotswolds (Stroud: The History Press, 2018); Bland. 25 George Robb, ‘Eugenics, Sexuality and Sex Differentiation in Edwardian England: The Case of Frances Swiney’, in: Journal of Women’s History, 10:3 (1998), pp. 97-117; George Robb, ‘Marriage and Reproduction’, in: M. Houlbrook and H. Cocks (eds.), Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (London: Palgrave, 2006), pp. 87-108. 26 Robb, ‘Marriage and Reproduction’, p. 94. 4 which theosophical ideas supposedly influenced Swiney; neither do they put Swiney’s work into a wider theosophical context. Looking onto it from another angle, works such as Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism, and Diana Basham, The Trial of Woman, decidedly analyse alternative religious movements, such as Theosophy, and their influence on feminism in Britain, but neglect to mention Frances Swiney.27 By observing transatlantic encounters of feminism, Lucy Delap identifies the strong role of the Theosophical Society in terms of transnational conversations and exchange of ideas.28 Historian of gender, sexuality, and religion Joy Dixon and historian of religion Siv Ellen Kraft, examine the impact of the Theosophical Society on feminism and on the discourse of gender and sexuality with a shared focus on Britain.29 Both scholars, however, conclude that Swiney was an exceptional figure who did not represent the theosophical feminist mainstream. Contrastingly, I will argue that Swiney used established theosophical ideas, but because her feminism had to engage in the discourses of reproduction and motherhood, this shifted the focus of her Theosophy and changed her interpretations of classical theosophical teachings. As a gender history dissertation, it uses a biographical approach to analyse the possibility of an individual gendered agency in discourse. It is based on various primary sources, such as pamphlets; articles; and books by Swiney; as well as a few letters by, to, and about Swiney; contemporary books; newspaper and periodical articles; theosophical books and periodicals; and official documents by relevant suffrage and women’s rights societies. I will address my topic in a similar fashion to Diana Burfield who uses biographies to engage with the question of class and feminism in the Theosophical Society. For her, ‘in order to make more specific and meaningful connections between class and ideology, [a biographical approach] provides evidence about an individual’s location in a network (…) that discloses the channels through which certain ideas reached them’.30 Nevertheless, biographies do have 27 Schwartz; Diana Basham, The Trial of Woman: Feminism and the Occult Sciences in Victorian Literature and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1992) 28 Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 29 Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Siv Ellen Kraft, The Sex Problem: Political Aspects of Gender Discourse in the Theosophical Society, 1875-1930 (Dissertation, University of Bergen, 1999) 30 Diana Burfield, ‘Theosophy and Feminism: Some Explorations in 19th century Biography’, in: Pat Holden (ed.), Women’s Religious Experience, (London, 1983), p. 28. 5 certain limitations. A biography focusses on one individual life and is, therefore, limited to that lifetime in its analysis. The lifetime becomes the historical category, the historian views history through the lens of the specific individual. However, a lifetime is how people experience history and it is, therefore, a manageable and profitable category for analysing the past.31 This corresponds with the notion of individual agency. In discourse, ‘“subjection” signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject.’32 This subordination also enables a subject’s possibilities in discourse, its agency.33 Biographies enable the historian to give room for the individual which is often invisible in the analysed networks of social and cultural forces controlling it.34 However, the historian must take into account the forces which produced the individual and ‘provided the scope for the individual’s impact, and shaped or constrained that impact’.35 Putting one life into the centre of analysis risks to overemphasise the person’s impact and possibility of agency in relation to his/her historical context. Furthermore, the self, which is at the centre of any biographical study, is always gendered. Subjects are gendered beings acting in discursive limitations, which restricts the subject’s agency to gendered agency. In other words: subjects can perceive the social world and act in it only in a gendered way; hence, social/discursive agency is always gendered, as there is no individual process of identification separate from the ascription of one gender.36 Therefore, the biographical approach on Frances Swiney will apply poststructuralist theories to investigate the possibilities and restraints of a female subject and its gendered agency in discourse. It is used to answer Judith Butler’s question: ‘How can it be that the subject, taken to be the condition for and instrument of agency, is at the same time the effect of subordination, understood as the deprivation of agency?’37 A biographical approach is particularly useful for this dissertation’s analysis. It will enable the examination of Swiney as a subject in feminist, religious, and scientific discourses concerned with race, motherhood, and reproduction; it will enhance the general premises of Dixon, Kraft, 31 Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Hoddor Arnold, 2006), pp. 45-7. 32 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 2. 33 Ibid., p. 8. 34 Simon Dixon, Catherine the Great (New York: Longman, 2001), p. 10. 35 Ibid., p. 37. 36 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discoursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), passim. 37 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p. 10. 6 and Burfield by analysing how a feminist context influenced Swiney’s interpretations of Theosophy. Furthermore, it will examine the possibilities of an individual’s impact on her historical context. I will argue that Swiney, her work, and the League of Isis are ‘little-known (…) except among historians’ because she was bound to the restrictions and changes of her context. Hence, this dissertation will look at the possibility of Swiney’s gendered agency and her impact, by analysing the discourses which produced her specific feminist agenda: imperial feminism and Theosophy. The following chapter will answer the question in what ways did Swiney’s life in the Empire and in the feminist circles of Cheltenham influence her imperial and racial feminism? It examines the imperial and feminist circles of Cheltenham, as well as the focus of the feminist debates on reproduction and motherhood to illustrate the development and interrelation of Swiney’s perceptions of race, the Empire, and India. This chapter uses the theory of “othering” to analyse Swiney’s feminism as a discursive resistance against the conception of the woman as the Victorian “Other”. Chapter three will focus on Swiney’s connection to Theosophy and analyse what esoteric ideas she applied in her works. I will especially look at her conceptions of Gnosticism, evolution, and the Tarot to illuminate her characteristic concepts of the Divine Feminine and the Law of Isis. Afterwards, it examines the League of Isis as an attempt to overcome a perceived differentiation of science and religion, as typical for Theosophists. This chapter uses Swiney as an example to illustrate the possibility of female agency and feminism in an alternative religious framework. Lastly, chapter four examines Swiney’s perception and influence in local, national, and global esoteric and secular circles. Swiney, who was already a prominent figure in Cheltenham, always tried to reach an international audience. Again, the League of Isis is used to illustrate this attempt, to analyse an individual’s impact; as well as hindrances, to examine the dependence of the subject on the changing historical context. 7 2 ‘Mothers of the Race’ – Imperial Feminism Rosa Frances Emily Swiney [née Biggs] was born and married into an upper middle-class family. Her father, John Biggs, was at the time of her birth, 21 April 1847, Major of the 8th Foot and afterwards of the 4th Royal Dragoon, stationed in India. He was a member of a ‘wellknown’ Anglo-Irish family with connections to the noble family of Warwickshire on the maternal side, as well as a direct descendant of Sir Isaac Newton’s sister on the paternal side.1 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 ability’ already became apparent in her paintings.2 Swiney was home educated (with an emphasis on art) by her tutor, the son of the famous painter Francis Danby. She drew numerous pictures of Indian scenes which won prizes at exhibitions in Birmingham and Madras, demonstrating her permanent imperial entanglements.3. On 15 June 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.4 They married at the Trinity Church in Paddington, London, the officiating clergymen were her uncle Rev. Hesleeth Biggs and a relative of her new husband, Rev. A. Swiney.5 Their wedding was reported 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”.’6 Even though she wanted to be a professional painter, the increasing responsibilities of the first six years of marriage and young family life in India were a barrier.7 Swiney gave birth to six children, four boys and two girls, one of which died as a child.8 Their first son, Gilbert M. 1 ‘Death of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney: Famous Champion of her Sex’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 4 May 1922, p. 3. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.; ‘News from the Newspapers’, in: Cheltenham Looker-On, 17 June 1871, p. 380. 5 Cheltenham Looker-On, 17 June 1871, p. 380. 6 Ibid.; ‘Local Intelligence’, in: The Worcester Herald, 24 June, 1871, p. 3. 7 The Gloucestershire Echo, 4 May 1922, p. 3. 8 ‘Cheltenham and County’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo,18 May 1918, p. 4. 8 Swiney, was born in Madras, in January 1873, as well as the second son, Hesketh Swiney, in February 1874.9 Probably, her third son, Sydney Swiney, was also born in India. In 1877, Swiney arrived in Cheltenham with her three children to send them to school in England.10 This was not uncommon for families who did not settle in India permanently, as army officers like Col. Swiney. Traveling due to long-term residences overseas, interrupted by furloughs and retirements in England were a central part of their identity formation.11 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 ‘cultural contamination’.12 Therefore, any family who could afford to do so sent their children ‘home’.13 Swiney left Madras together with her three children, which was relatively unusual, most wives stayed in India with their husbands.14 However, this is not surprising, since, as I will examine in this dissertation, a fulfilling motherhood and spending time with one’s children was central to Swiney’s feminism. Families like the Swineys tried to establish their own communities, overseas and ‘back in Britain’.15 Therefore, as Buettner argues, they can be seen as being most influenced by the empire in comparison to other British communities.16 Cheltenham was one of these centres; it became known to be a place for colonial adults to retire or to visit during furlough. Furthermore, Cheltenham College was well-known amongst British-Indian parents. Col. Swiney himself was born in Cheltenham, in 1832, and went to the College as a day boy from 1841 to 1848.17 His father and his uncle, John Swiney, were two of the first directors of the college.18 As Buettner examines, Cheltenham College and similar schools ‘not only attracted a substantial imperial clientele but also played central roles in perpetuating this identity into the next generation by training their pupils for imperial careers’.19 Unsurprisingly, Col. Swiney started his career in 1850, when he was 9 ‘Births’, in: Canterbury Journal, Kentish Times and Farmers' Gazette, 01 February 1873; ‘Births’, in; Cheltenham Chronicle, 24 March 1874, p. 2. 10 ‘Arrivals, Departures, and Removals’, in: Cheltenham Chronicle, 16 January 1877, p. 2. 11 Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 2f. 12 Ibid., p. 9. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., p. 6. 15 Ibid., p. 16 and 18. 16 Ibid. 17 Cheltenham College Register 1841-1927. 18 The Gloucestershire Echo,18 May 1918, p. 4. 19 Buettner, p. 18. 9 appointed to the 32nd Madras Naval Infantry.20 He only joined the family nine years later, in 1886, and officially retired in 1890.21 He visited the family in Pittville, Cheltenham, in 1879, when he was granted furlough for 14 months on medical certificate.22 Their fourth son, Arundel Swiney, was born in 1881, followed by their surviving daughter, Gladys Swiney, in 1887, after Col. Swiney’s return.23 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.24 Hence, Swiney’s family life can be seen as being exemplary for an imperially entangled upper middle-class family in the Victorian era. Unlike her husband, who did not partake in political affairs, Swiney started to play an active part in politics and public affairs, probably after completing lactating her daughter by 1890.25 When Swiney settled in Cheltenham, the town was already becoming one of several important places of suffrage activism outside of London. Its first detectable suffragist was Harriet McIlquham who was a member of the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage since 1877. She co-founded the WFL in 1889, together with Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, and helped to establish the Women’s Emancipation Union (WEU), founded by the latter. The WEU mainly published pamphlets for the cause of women’s enfranchisement from October 1891 to July 1899.26 Harriet McIlquham, in Swiney’s words, was the person to ‘bring before her the urgency of the women’s suffrage cause’.27 The WEU was the first suffrage society of which Swiney became a member.28 The year 1896 marks the starting point of Swiney’s independent activism. In this year, she published her first book, The Plea for Disenfranchised Women, which was distributed with 20 The Gloucestershire Echo,18 May 1918, p. 4; his brother, Capt. E. R. R. Swiney, had a similar education and career, ‘Married’, in: Cheltenham Looker-On, 23 March 1901, p. 282. 21 The Gloucestershire Echo,18 May 1918, p. 4; Cheltenham College Register 1841-1927. 22 ‘Military Intelligence’, in: Freeman's Journal, 18 September 1879, p. 2. 23 ‘Births’, in: Cheltenham Looker-On, 12 March 1881, p. 171; ‘Birth’, in: Cheltenham Looker-On, 20 August 1887, p. 579. 24 Cheltenham College Register 1841-1927; The Gloucestershire Echo, 4 May 1922, p. 3. 25 The Gloucestershire Echo, 4 May 1922, p. 3. 26 Sue Jones, Votes for Women: Cheltenham and the Cotswolds (Stroud: The History Press, 2018), p. 31. 27 ‘A Cheltenham Leader of the Women’s Movement’, in: The Cheltenham Looker-On, 7 February 1920, p. 18. 28 Peter Gordon and David Doughan, Dictionary of British Women’s Organisations, 1825-1960 (London: Woburn Press, 2001),p. 163. 10 40,000 copies by the WEU.29 Even though her first book is not acknowledged by scholarship to be one of Swiney’s important works, it indicates the basic premises of her imperialist and racial feminism. It coincided with the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897; Swiney argued that in the light of being governed for sixty years by a female sovereign ‘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.30 Referring to McIlquham’s pamphlet, The Enfranchisement of Women (1892), Swiney argued that any interpretations of the legal term “man” only includes women when it refers to duties and obligations, but excludes them, when the matter is concerned with rights and privileges: ‘Never was there a legal interpretation more open to the change and mere arrogant sex-bias, prejudice, and inconsistency.’31 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 development and advancement of the English Race’.32 Also in 1896, Swiney, Miss McLea, Mrs. McIlquham, Miss Sumby, and Mrs. Edward Ward founded the Cheltenham WSS, of which Swiney remained the sole president for 33 years.33 The Cheltenham WSS became a local branch of the national, non-militant, umbrella society National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which was created by Millicent Fawcett in 1897 and with approximately 50,000 adherents by 1914, it became the single largest suffrage organisation in Britain.34 The Cheltenham WSS had, according to Sue Jones, predominantly female and male members from the local middle-class and social elite.35 Swiney’s great house on Sandford Lawn was the venue of most of Cheltenham’s WSS meetings and feminist speeches, as well as Garden Fairs to raise funds for the WSS, in July 1909 and July 2012.36 Furthermore, her social reputation enabled her to support other local activists through testifying on their behalf in court. For instance, in 1908, Mrs. Emma Sproson, a WFL campaigner, was summoned to court for chalking the pavement. Many local feminists came to 29 The Gloucestershire Echo, 4 May 1922, p. 3. 30 Frances Swiney, The Plea of Disfranchised Women (Cheltenham: Shenton, 1896), pp. 1 and 4. 31 Ibid., p. 3. 32 Ibid., p. 4. 33 The Gloucestershire Echo, 4 May 1922, p. 3. 34 Leslie Parker Hume, The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, 1897-1914 (London: Garland, 1982), p. 1. 35 Jones, p. 39. 36 Ibid.; ‘Women’s Suffrage Society: Garden Fair’, in: Cheltenham Looker-On, 24 July 1909, p. 17; ‘Women and the Vote’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 8 July 1912. 11 court to support her, and the chairman asked Swiney to speak for them to defend Mrs. Sproson.37 Thanks to her financial wealth, she could not only support the Cheltenham WSS, but later also the militant local WSPU, which had its first meeting in Cheltenham on 28 September 1906.38 However, Swiney’s feminism did not solely concentrate on her own class. Most of her speeches dealt with working class women and the need for social reform as a part of the women’s cause.39 This correlates with Lucy Bland’s analysis of a middle-class desire to civilize and care for the poor and underprivileged.40 For instance, at the Annual Meeting of the Cheltenham WSS in 1901, she argued that the economic and industrial conditions of women workers were of central importance for the woman’s cause.41 In 1908, Swiney lectured at the Odd Fellows Hall in Cheltenham on ‘The Industrial Position of Women’ under the auspices of the Cheltenham branch of the Independent Labour Party. Swiney argued that there is no “male” or “female” labour; gendered aspects would depend on the context and culture. In ‘earlier ages’, labour was valued more highly than in modern times, but due to woman’s subjection, various types of labour were not perceived as worthy. Women were ‘exploited without fear of political reprisals’.42 Therefore, the enfranchisement of working women in particular was essential to end economic injustice.43 Even though Cheltenham was a centre of feminist activism, there was, likewise, a large group of anti-feminists and opponents of the suffrage movement. This resulted in aggression towards and various attacks even on non-militant suffragists.44 In July 1913, local campaigners of Cheltenham were taking part in the Great March to London, which was organised by the NUWSS with the object of placing the claims of women before the Parliament. However, on their way through Cheltenham, they became the ‘subject to disgraceful treatment at the hands of hooligans and loafers whose actions [could] only be regarded with shame and contempt by 37 Jones, p. 71. 38 Ibid., p. 112. 39 Ibid., p. 38. 40 Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality (London: Tauris, 2001), p. 199. 41 Jones, p. 38. 42 ‘The Industrial Position of Women: Lecture of Mrs. Swiney’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 19 November 1908. 43 Ibid; see also Swiney’s subsequent article: Frances Swiney, ‘Women’s Industries’, in: Westminster Review, 171:4 (1909), pp. 383-395. 44 Jones, p. 72f. 12 the decent-minded men of the town’, an incident ‘unparalleled in the history of the local suffrage movemen’.45 Swiney, who alongside others tried to make her claims heard, was hit by a bad-egg on her hat.46 In her response, in October 1913, Swiney said they would not ‘recognise the arguments either of rotten eggs or of bells, howls, or even of threats of life’, and concluded that they could not meet the anti-suffragists with arguments, reason, or logic.47 A year before, however, a meeting aiming for the exchange of arguments took place in Cheltenham. The League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage, with Miss Gladys Potts as their speaker, invited guests from both sides and Swiney to oppose to Miss Potts’ views. The Gloucestershire Echo called it ‘one of the most interesting meetings ever held in Cheltenham’.48 This meeting illustrates the central theme of the feminist debate in Cheltenham, especially its focus on “nature”, reproduction, and the Empire. It gives an insight to Swiney’s ideological stance and the grounds on which she had to argue. In Miss Potts’ opinion, the anti-suffragists were often misunderstood. They would not oppose women’s suffrage because they thought the Empire was in a good state at the time, but because they thought it wasn’t in the interest of the Empire, that it would not solve its problems, but ‘remedy the evils which existed’.49 She maintained that in general, all voters should have a sense of political affairs, so no ordinary persons should be allowed to gain the vote. For her, the ‘inestimable mothering instinct’ in women would hinder them in any public affairs: Nature had herself painted to man as the physically stronger and more capable of dealing with the public and wealth-producing side of life, and to woman, simply because she was he childbearer, as more fitted for and capable of dealing with the private side of life.50 Swiney responded tothat when (echoing her argument in The Plea for Disenfranchised Women), she claimed justice for women as ‘aiders in creating the wealth of the nation and as mothers of the race’.51 Furthermore, elsewhere in the colonies where women were getting the vote, there was less poverty and better work options. Thus, she argued that in light of the Empire, women should get the vote everywhere, especially in Britain.52 45 ‘Cheltenham Disgraced’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 16. July 1913. 46 Ibid. 47 ‘Mrs. Swiney on Recent Hooliganism’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 4 October 1913, p. 3. 48 ‘Should Women have the Vote? Interesting Debate in Cheltenham’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 4 December 1912. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 13 As it can be seen, Swiney’s feminist argument rested in the differentiation 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.53 Swiney’s main argument rested in 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.54 Man and woman, therefore, in an ideal marriage, will co-operate as the complement of the other towards this end; each bringing out the best that is in the other: each generously acknowledging a superiority in the distinctive and individual capacities of the different sexes.55 For Swiney, womanhood meant fulfilling one’s duty as a wife and mother, her duty as a citizen to save the British race, which should result in woman’s franchise.56 Gender, the social role of the sexes, is herein not only relational, but equal to the biological sex. According to Kent, nineteenth century middle-class society conceptualised women as “the sex”, as primarily reproductive beings; as well as simultaneously, sexual beings, or, more specifically: as sexual objects.57 The construction of this idea of an eternal feminine is the centrepiece of analysis in Simone de Beauvoir’s book; The Second Sex. “Femininity” is what women are becoming in society.58 Masculine and feminine are both social constructed categories and identities. However, the masculine is the neutral, the standard, the position which does not need a positioning. In contrast, woman is the negative, the identity which is only constructed as the counterpart of the man, therefore always a limited, lesser version of the standard.59 And she is nothing other than what man decides; she is thus called ‘the sex’, meaning that the male sees her essentially as a sexed being; for him she is sex, so she is it in the absolute. She determines and differentiates herself in relation to man, and he does not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.60 The connections to Kent’s analysis of nineteenth century conceptions of “women” and Swiney’s ideas of womanhood and sexuality are evident. For Beauvoir, a woman’s body is 53 Susan Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 (London: Routledge, 1987), passim; see for the French case: Jessica Albrecht, ‘Gendered citizenship, suffrage and reproduction in the writings and lives of nineteenth century French feminists Jeanne Deroin and Jenny P. d’Héricourt’, in: Engendering the Past 1:1 (2018), p. 66. 54 Swiney, The Awakening of Women, p. 56f. 55 Ibid., p. 118. 56 Ibid., passim. 57 Kent, p. 24. 58 Simone de Beauvoir, Extracts from The Second Sex (London: Vintage Books, 2015), p. 4. 59 Ibid., p. 6. 60 Ibid., p. 7. 14 without meaning if it is without reference to the male body.61 Any definition of the Self needs the exclusion of the Other. However, the Other is not unconscious of itself as a consequence.62 Defining female sexuality only by reproduction, symbolises the identification of woman with the Other of male sexuality. Nevertheless, the Other is not defining the One, because there would be no Other without the One positioning it as the Other.63 When Swiney states the superiority of womanhood and the female body in reproduction, she reproduces and confirms the discursive conception of woman as “the sex”. In her argument, she is bound to the discursive limitations of being the Other. Historian of gender and feminism in the Empire, Antoniette Burton, argues that because British women were the Other in Victorian culture, their agency was restricted, since they were no subjects as such. Therefore, feminists tried to gain national subjectivity, ‘to be a subject in the former political sense’ by identifying feminism with the Empire.64 However, they needed to create another Other: the colonized female Other. According to Burton, India had always been a special colony and was important for Britain’s imperial confidence. Accordingly, Indian women became the centre of an imperial feminist argument, an invention of a new national, feminist narrative of cultural progress.65 By identifying with the Nation British feminists tried to undermine their construction as the Other; thereby, they were othering Indian women. These became the ‘subjects in need of salvation by their British feminist “sisters”’.66 As Dixon points out, this resulted in a contrasting image: The degraded Indian womanhood as victim against the privileged British feminists as ‘agents of their own liberation’.67 According to Burton, Christianity was used as legitimation and authorisation of (British) woman’s moral role, but imperial feminism was a ‘secular project’.68 Burton categorises Swiney’s The Awakening of Women and her racial evolutionism as ‘perhaps the most unabashed elaboration of racial 61 Beauvoir, de, p. 7. 62 Ibid., p. 8. 63 Ibid., p. 9. 64 Antoniette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (London: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 16. 65 Ibid, pp 17 and 29ff. 66 Ibid., pp. 1 and 35. 67 Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 155. 68 Burton, p. 43. 15 feminism’.69 However, I will argue that, even though Swiney spoke in the name of Indian women, her work is exceptional and does not match all of Burton’s arguments. Swiney regularly wrote articles for the Indian Ladies’ Magazine, a monthly journal for and by women to help the Indian women’s cause, which was founded by Kammala Satthianadhan in 1901. It featured mainly articles by Indian women and translated them into English to widen their readership. It was concerned with Indian identity politics, its emerging nationalism, and Christian-Indian women’s life.70 Swiney’s articles mainly focussed on the issue of the ‘childwife’ and male sexual vices, like other feminists cornered with India.71 Nevertheless, she also wrote about religion. In her article Women Among the Nations (1905) in the Westminster Review, Swiney criticised the subjection of Indian women by the men of modern India as well as by British men. For her, this symbolised the degeneration of that race which, in ancient India, a time of glory, had positioned women highly, not restricted her rights or put her under unnatural laws.72 She compared this to the influence of Christianity in Europe. According to her, Christianity restricted and enslaved women; it was the reason for the inequality of the sexes.73 In 1914, Swiney published the pamphlet Our Indian Sisters, in which she described some of her experiences in India and summed up the history of Indian feminism. She expanded the above described argument by saying that India is in a state of unrest, because it is governed by Christian rulers. The Englishmen, who claimed their superiority ‘upon the purity of their religious faith (…) left [their] virtues in England and landed in India with [their] vices’.74 In Hinduism woman would be ‘supremely honoured’, but the Englishman ‘despised the womanhood of India as he despised the motherhood at home’, so ‘we need not wonder that the Hindu woman questions the purity of the Christian religion’.75 Moreover, Swiney already detected Indian’s regeneration in the revival of religion and its way to admitting the cosmic truth of the supremacy of the Divine Motherhood.76 As shown, even though Swiney was concerned with saving Indian woman from (British) male sexual vice, similar to many other 69 Burton., p. 85. 70 Deborah Anna Logan, The Indian Ladies’ Magazine 1901-1938: From Raj to Swaraj (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2017), pp. xif., 253ff.) 71 Frances Swiney, ‘Woman’s Redemption’, in: Indian Ladies’ Magazine, December 1903. 72 Frances Swiney, ‘Women Among the Nations’, in: Westminster Review, 164:5 (1905), p. 538. 73 Ibid, p. 544; see also: Swiney, The Awakening of Women, pp. 53ff. 74 Frances Swiney, ‘Our Indian Sisters’, Racial Pamphlets No. 12 (Cheltenham: League of Isis or the Law of the Mother, 1914), p. 3. 75 Ibid., p. 9f. 76 Ibid., p. 33. 16 imperial feminists, she did not support the argument of Britain’s superiority due to its religion, indeed, she explicitly opposed to it. To sum up, this chapter introduced Frances Swiney, an upper middle-class woman whose private and family life was entangled in Britain’s imperial history. As many other women in Cheltenham, she became involved in the fight for women’s suffrage and feminism in general. I argued that Swiney’s feminism was mainly concerned with reproduction and mothering, two aspects that the discourse at the time associated womanhood with. She turned these negative ascriptions around and used them in a positive way to argue for the acknowledgement of women’s role in the Empire and for the British race. This can be seen as a form of resistance and use of agency in a discourse of othering the woman in Victorian culture. Furthermore, she is an example for an imperial feminist, since she put herself in the role of the fighter for Indian women’s rights. The discourses of reproduction and motherhood, racial and imperial feminism, constitute the historical context which influenced Swiney’s feminism. However, as we have seen, religion played a central part in her argumentation. She did not agree with the general thought of Christianity’s superiority over other religions and its morality over other civilisations. This fact is quite typical for theosophical feminists, who viewed ancient Indian religion as the great origin of the Anglo-Saxon race, and Christianity as the reason for the current state of women’s rights. Therefore, the following chapter will examine the impact of Theosophy on Swiney’s feminism and how it created the possibility of a feminist agency in a religious discourse. 17 3 ‘The Natural Law of Isis’ – Swiney’s Theosophy Cheltenham was not only a town of imperial families and local feminist activists, for two years (1870-72) it was also the home of Annie Besant, who later became the second leader of the Theosophical Society (TS).1 Another well-known frequent visitor to Cheltenham was Charlotte Despard, a famous theosophical feminist, who published the book Theosophy and the Woman’s Movement (1913). Swiney herself became a member of the TS in 1898.2 By the end of the nineteenth century, a transformation of Britain’s religious culture was happening, including an increase in esoteric and occult religions.3 Theosophy was the largest and most influential of these.4 The TS was founded in 1875 in New York by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, as an alternative religious movement devoted to forming a universal brotherhood and to ‘encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy and science’5 In 1878, both travelled to India via London, founding the London Lodge, followed by establishing their headquarters in Adyar, Madras, in 1882.6 The TS played a major role in combining western esotericism and occultism, such as spiritualism, ‘Neoplatonism, Renaissance magic, Kabbalah, and Freemasonry, together with ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman mythology, joined by Eastern doctrines taken from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta to present the idea of an ancient wisdom handed down from prehistoric times.’7 This dialogue between western esotericism and romantic ideas of the Orient resulted in the globalisation of esotericism.8 Occultism or esotericism, and Theosophy in particular, were attractive for British feminists or other women who ‘needed to reconstruct their shaken faith’ in traditional Christianity.9 The 1 Annie Besant, An Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 94. 2 Letter Annie Besant to Piet, Conway 1898. 3 Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 20; J. Jeffrey Franklin, Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain (London: Cornell University Press, 2018), passim. 4 Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 3. 5 H.P. Blavatsky, ’Our Three Objects’, in: Lucifer, September 1889. 6 Dixon, p. 3. 7 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 212. 8 Ibid., p. 213. 9 Diana Burfield, ‘Theosophy and Feminism: Some Explorations in 19th century Biography’, in: Pat Holden (ed.), Women’s Religious Experience, (London, 1983), p. 33; George Robb, ‘Marriage and Reproduction’, in: M. 18 syncretistic teachings of Theosophy became a place for ideas which were dismissed elsewhere, especially the idea of women playing an equal part in religion.10 Apart from enabling women to be religious leaders, like Blavatsky and later Annie Besant, Diana Burfield detected a twofold appeal which Theosophy had to women: on the one hand, the TS objected to sexual discrimination in the first of their three objects: ‘1. To form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour’.11 On the other hand, the content of theosophical teaching was based on an evolutionary progress which needed the interaction of the two principles (male and female) working together for the dynamic of the cosmic process, spiritually legitimising the equality of the sexes.12 Furthermore, sexual abstinence or chastity outside of marriage, as promoted by the TS, ‘offered consolation to women who were anxious to escape compulsory (…) sexual intercourse’.13 Being a member of the Theosophical Society was not untypical for British feminists at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, Frances Swiney and Charlotte Despard being two of many prominent personas.14 As Dixon points out, it cannot be said that membership resulted in all cases in a close engagement in theosophical ideas. However, their membership signifies an interest in spiritual matters and alternative religiosities.15 Theosophy used the ideas of ancient and modern goddesses for empowerment and as an alternative to patriarchal Christianity.16 Without committing themselves to any specific dogma, they believed in self-development and the evolutionary transformation of humanity.17 Many feminists believed that the Secret Doctrine by Blavatsky offered new possibilities for the relation between the sexes by conceptualising the male and the female as equal parts in the cosmic development. Blavatsky described an evolution of humans through seven races (stages), whereby the last two were astral and spiritual. Humans would ascend to a Higher Self, the Houlbrook and H. Cocks (eds.), Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (London: Palgrave, 2006), p. 94. 10 Burfield, p. 33. 11 Blavatsky, H. P., ’Our Three Objects’; Charlotte Despard distinctively refers to this at various points in her book, Charlotte Despard, Theosophy and the Woman’s Movement (London: TPS, 1913), passim. 12 Burfield, p. 35. 13 Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930 (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 148. 14 Bland, p. 167; Dixon, p. 6. 15 Dixon, p. 6. 16 Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), p. 29. 17 Schwartz, p. 20. 19 Divine Hermaphrodite, and become a part of the sexless and formless Universal Divine Principle.18 Even though Swiney was a member of the TS, her work differs from the general theosophical ideas and it was debated within the TS.19 Dixon argues, that Swiney used ‘theosophical vocabulary’, basic theses and texts, but that her main argument, the cosmic development back to the Divine Feminine, would contradict the concept of the Divine Hermaphrodite.20 This chapter will examine which theosophical concepts and ideas Swiney used for developing her argument and to what extent it differed from theosophical and related occult thought. I will argue that Swiney utilised the ideas of the TS for a feminist agency within a religious discourse. As examined above, Swiney blamed institutionalised Christianity for the subjection of women. However, Swiney’s esotericism makes use of a theosophical interpretation of Gnosticism. G. R. S. Mead (1863-1933), president of the Blavatsky Lodge in London and private secretary to Blavatsky, as well as founder of the European Section of the TS and editor of The Theosophical Review, engaged with the subjects of Gnosticism, Neo-Platonism, and Hermeticism. For him, the true Gnosis was Theosophy.21 He left the TS in 1909, but he had written several books concerned with Gnosticism by then, such as Pistis Sophia (1896) and Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1900). These are two of Swiney’s major sources for her esotericism. In her article, The Maternity of God (1906), Swiney changed from criticising Christianity in its current state to trying to use Gnosticism for her feminism. According to her, Christianity, in its early ages, was deeply imbued with the ‘sublime feminism of the Gnostics’.22 In 1909, she published the book The Esoteric Teaching of the Gnostics, in which she agreed with Mead that the Gnostics tried to discover a world-religion in harmony with science, ‘to create a theosophy which would appeal to all minds’.23 Like Mead, Swiney argued that Sophia, the Wisdom, was interpreted by the Gnostics as the Holy Spirit and the Mother of the Son.24 However, Swiney, typically, went 18 Dixon, p. 154. 19 Siv Ellen Kraft, The Sex Problem: Political Aspects of Gender Discourse in the Theosophical Society, 18751930 (Dissertation, University of Bergen, 1999), p. 166. 20 Dixon, p 168. 21 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke and Clare Goodrick-Clarke, George R. S. Mead and the Gnostic Quest (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2005), pp. 1 and 168. 22 Frances Swiney, ‘The Maternity of God’, in: Westminster Review, 165:5 (1906), p. 556. 23 Swiney, The Esoteric Teaching of the Gnostics, p. 1f. 24 Goodrick-Clarke and Goodrick-Clarke, pp. 70ff.; Swiney, The Esoteric Teaching of the Gnostics, p. 12. 20 a step further and used this premise for her feminist argument. In Swiney’s opinion, the Gnostics were being supressed by the male priesthood of the Christian Church because they ‘kept true to the original pristine faith in the Femininity of the Holy Spirit’.25 For her, the Divine Mother was oneness of the sublime cause, and all emanation would derive from her and return to her in the end of the circled cosmic process.26 For the soul is the feminine creative principle in man (…). The Feminine is therefore the inner nature of man, and woman (…), the objective representative of the Divine Feminine.27 The world would currently be in the masculine phase, a phase of the subjugation of women which would have to end if humankind wishes to be reunited with the Holy Spirit, the Divine Feminine.28 Mead’s interpretation of Gnosticism was not the only theme Swiney adopted from Theosophy. As its title suggests, The Awakening of Women or Woman’s Part in Evolution (1899), puts women in an evolutionist framework. 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’.29 Feminism and the end of women’s material and spiritual subjugation are seen as inevitable steps in the evolution of humankind.30 The concept of evolution plays a central role in all of her works. For instance, in The Cosmic Procession (1906), she argued that a cosmic procession led by the Feminine Principal went alongside the physical evolution.31 In The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross (1908), she further developed this argument and described the evolutionary cosmic process of life.32 Paralleling the biological evolution with a spiritual evolution is one of the central themes in theosophical thought. In her first major work, Isis Unveiled (1877), 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 25 Swiney, The Esoteric Teaching of the Gnostics, p. 15. 26 Ibid., pp 11f. 27 Ibid., p. 21. 28 Ibid., pp. 25 and 31ff. 29 Swiney, The Awakening of Women, p. 18. 30 Ibid., passim. 31 Frances Swiney, The Cosmic Procession or The Feminine Principle in Evolution (London: Ernest Bell, 1906), p. vii ff. 32 Frances Swiney, The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross (London: Open Road Publ., 1908), passim. 21 spirit.33 Using an esoteric interpretation of the Kabballah, Blavatsky argued that all life would progress in circles. Cultures would flourish, reach climaxes, degenerate and become extinct again.34 In The Secret Doctrine (1888), which laid the foundation of modern Theosophy, she described the stages of the world’s cosmogenesis until modern times.35 She explained it by using religious symbols which, according to her, were common to every religion. In the beginning, the Divine would be of ever-eternal nature, symbolised by a plain disc ◯. The disc with a point ☉ stands for the first differentiation, though the Divine is still sexless and infinite. In the next step the point becomes the female line ⊝ to symbolise the ‘divine immaculate Mother-Nature within the all-embracing absolute Infinitude’.36 This becomes the mundane cross, Å, which is when the human life began. When the circumference disappears, it becomes the phallic cross, ✚, and means that the ‘fall of men into matter‘ is completed.37 It later becomes the Tau, Τ, symbolising the separation of the sexes, the contemporary fifth race. Before changing back to the plain disc, it would become the circle, ⦶, the sexless, but separated life. The ⦶ symbolises the same as ☥, the Egyptian emblem of life.38 In general, Blavatsky, as mentioned above, believed in the concept of the Divine Hermaphrodite: In its absoluteness, the One Principal under its two aspects (…) is sexless, unconditioned and eternal. Its periodical (…) emanation (…) is also One, androgynous and phenomenally finite. When the radiation radiates in its turn, all its radiations are also androgynous, to become male and female principles in their lower aspects.39 In The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross, Swiney made a similar approach. She tried to answer the question why there is the maleness and the femaleness, and how the subjection of women is related to the cosmic process. 33 H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1877), p. xxx. 34 Ibid., p. 293f. 35 H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I (London: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1888), pp 4f. 36 Ibid., p. 4. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., p. 4f. 39 Ibid., p. 18. 22 Figure 3 Figure 4 The circle of life starts off with the cosmic circle and centre 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 second, the First Cross, is the symbol of creation (2.). It is the first life produced, still female and existing alone. The third, the Male Cross, or the Cross of Negation (3.), stands for the fertiliser, 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’.40 This is the state of the first fertilisation, which, as Swiney emphasised, 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, symbolised by the Sistrum of Isis (5.). It shows the ‘times of the mother’; the time when a couple should live chaste, when the womb is closed after conception during degestation, and the time of lactation. This is supposed 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, 40 Swiney, The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross, pp. 12ff. 23 or inclination to the will or command of the Mother of all living.’41 When man started to practice sexual excess and woman lost her power for selection – that is when ‘the race began to degenerate’.42 This is portrayed in the Symbol of the Male or the Unit (6.). The straight line symbolises the male organ, but ‘from a straight line nothing can proceed. (…) It is absolutely negative, for it begins in nothing and ends in nothing.’43 However, even this stage is necessary in the cosmic development, because the Unit must be separated from the Whole before it can be reunited with the Circle of Immortality, the One in Two (7.). Since it is a duality and no 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.44 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.’45 These two cosmogeneses aimed on demonstrating how Swiney utilised theosophical thought: As seen, she used some of the symbols and the general idea of a cosmic process, like Blavatsky. However, she attributed different meanings to the symbols and put them into another order to support her argument of the Feminine Principle and the Law of the Mother. The most striking example is the Bar of Isis (☥). It illustrates how Swiney used the interpretations of ancient Egyptian religions for her theosophical feminism. An Egyptian Isis worship was common in Victorian alternative religions, such as the TS and the Order of the Golden Dawn.46 For Swiney, the Bar of Isis symbolised the Law of Nature, the Law of the Mother. For Blavatsky, Isis also was the ‘symbol of nature’, a symbol for the Divine Mother.47 The sign of the Bar of Isis, ☥, is also part of the emblem of the TS. Here, the so-called Ankh is interpreted as the Egyptian cross or key, the symbol of life, the first union of the cross (matter) and the circle (spirit). Matter is often associated with the masculine and spirit with the feminine.48 Consequently, these two interpretations are not unalike. However, it remains 41 Swiney, The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross, pp. 43f. 42 Ibid., p. 45. 43 Ibid., p. 50. 44 Ibid., p. 54ff. 45 Ibid., p. 63. 46 Franklin, pp. 144 and 162. 47 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled I, p. 16. 48 https://www.theosophical.org/the-society/1955-the-seal-of-the-theosophical-society (last accessed 19 August 2018) 24 uncertain why Swiney called the Ankh “Bar of Isis”. Furthermore, in contrast to Blavatsky’s neutral interpretation, for Swiney, the state of the Bar of Isis is a desirable state, when the male subjugated himself to the Law of the Mother. Blavatsky was not the only prominent occult author who interpreted the Egyptian goddess Isis. MacGregor Mathers (1854-1918) lead the so called “Isis movement” in the 1890s in Paris. He developed the “Rite of Isis”, which became a ‘sensation’ in the Paris occult underworld, in 1899 and 1900.49 Mathers was a prominent member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a ‘magical’ society which shared members with the TS, and, likewise, created a synthesis of ‘ancient wisdoms’.50 In addition to teaching theory, they practiced ritual magic and practical occultism.51 Similar to the TS, they drew their ideas from Hermetics, interpretations of the Kabballah, and Alchemy. Mathers, who came to London in 1885, was in contact with Anna Kingsford, feminist and president of the London Lodge of the TS. He had various discussions with Blavatsky about the Kabbalah and lectured on this subject in theosophical lodges in 1886. In 1887, he published the Kabbalah Unveiled.52 This book had a major impact on Swiney; it seemed that it gave her the idea of the Feminine Principal in Semitic religions as the basic source of all life as well as to detect it in other religions.53 Referring to Mathers, Swiney saw the Kabbalah not as an unauthorised version of the Bible, but as the purified Semitic religion, in which Elohim is recognised to be the Divine Feminine. The Mother, so Swiney, was the origin of the Father and the Son, the masculine is, accordingly, only an intermediate phase of life.54 Adapting Mathers’ interpretation, Swiney equalised Isis with the Semitic Mother goddess.55 Unsurprisingly, Swiney subsequently developed the idea of the Bar of Isis, and called her own society later the League of Isis. On 3 December 1910, Swiney lectured at the Cheltenham Ethical Society on ‘Ancient Wisdom and Modern Application’. This lecture focussed on the Kabbalah Unveiled as well as the Egyptian Tarot.56 Like many members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, such as Mathers, W. 49 Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 81. 50 Ibid., p. 51. 51 Ibid. 52 Goodrick-Clarke, pp. 197f. 53 Swiney, The Cosmic Procession, pp. vii and 230ff. 54 Swiney, ‘The Maternity of God’, pp. 560f. 55 Ibid., p. 588. 56 ‘Cheltenham Ethical Society’, in: Cheltenham Looker-On, 3 December 1910, p. 26f. 25 B. Yeats, and Aleister Crowley, Swiney was interested in the Egyptian Tarot.57 For Swiney, the Tarot represented a ‘Golden Age’ of the world, when science synthesised with religion, just like the Kabbalah. Again, she argued that the Kabbalah and the Tarot would agree that everything proceeded from the Female, the Mother, and concluded that ‘the principle of life was Feminine’.58 As illustrated so far, Swiney based her argument on the idea of justice and law. Consequently, it does not surprise that she chose the card VIII of the Tarot, Justice, for her lecture. Mathers described this card as a crowned woman seated on a throne, holding a sword in her right and scales in her left hand. She symbolises justice, balance, and equilibrium.59 Figure 5: Example for card VIII Justice For Swiney, Justice, who is a woman, must also be a mother. As the Kabbalah says, so Swiney, when the masculine was separated from the feminine, sins multiplied and there would be no justice until they were reunited: Here, were seen the reasons for all the discord, injustices, strife, inequalities, misery, and inhumanity in the world at the present time. The masculine objective activities had tried to build up systems of theology, of government, of legislation, of morals, of society, divorced from the 57 See exemplarily: Aleister Crowley, Book of Thot: Egyptian Tarot (Weiser, 1944); S. L. MacGregor Mathers, The Tarot (New York: Weiser, 1869); Kathleen Raine, Yeats, the Tarot, and the Golden Dawn (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1972). 58 Cheltenham Looker-On, 3 December 1910, p. 26. 59 Mathers, pp. 7 and 9. 26 feminine creative principle of the true balance of life forces. (…) The horrors of our civilisation were entirely due to the non-recognition of this basic law.60 Another adaption of theosophical thought in Swiney’s feminism is the transgression of the perceived differentiation of religion and science. According to Franklin and Bergunder, nineteenth century Britain was transformed by the rise of science to ‘dominance in truth-telling authority’.61 Science claimed to explain supernatural phenomena with empirical methods.62 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 unsatisfactory and tried to defend belief against materialism.63 As a result, it enabled the rise of new religions and spiritualties.64 Esotericism, in particular, tried to transgress these boundaries. At first, spiritualism aimed on empirically verifying the contact with the dead in the spirit world, then occultism tried to discover the spiritual world through various scientific methods.65 This thought was adapted by the TS, as apparent in its second and third object: 2. To encourage the study of Comparative religion, Philosophy and Science. 3. To investigate unexplained laws of Nature and the powers latent in the human being.66 As Bergunder demonstrates, any attempt to overcome a differentiation between religion and science ‘required that there existed such a separation in the first place’.67 In Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky refers to Theosophy as the ‘Universal Wisdom-Religion, (…) the only possible key to the Absolute in science and theology’.68 Science and theology by themselves would fail; in contrast, occult science, like Theosophy would discover the truth by constantly comparing ideas from both.69 Such a comparison, or rather combination of science and religion is also evident in Swiney’s 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 60 Cheltenham Looker-On, 3 December 1910, p. 27. 61 Franklin, p. 1. 62 Michael Bergunder, ‘”Religion” and “Science” within a Global Religious History’, in: Aries, 16 (2016), p. 118. 63 Bergunder, p. 117; Franklin, p. ix. 64 Franklin, p. 1. 65 Bergunder, p. 118. 66 Blavatsky, H. P., ’Our Three Objects’. 67 Bergunder, p. 117. 68 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled I, p. vii. 69 Ibid., pp. xxxvii and xlv. 27 law of correspondence is fully understood with the essential oneness underlying all manifestation.70 Therefore, I argue that, Swiney also tried to overcome this boundary, and her work illustrates the inherent confidence that science and religion can be combined, as it was believed in the TS. As a consequence, she always supported a scientific argument with a theosophical and vice versa. Swiney’s own society, the League of Isis, saw its main goal in learning and teaching about the Natural Law of reproduction in order of ‘the betterment of the Race’ and ‘the building up of the Higher Self’.71 Its object was ‘the protection of maternity by means of right teaching (in the highest sense) of the law of sex’.72 Practically, this resulted in the preservation ‘in the woman during the creative periods of gestation and lactation absolute continence, so as to assure full, healthy development in the child, and no pathological symptoms in the mother during pregnancy, parturition, and nursing’, as well as in keeping ‘the Temple of the Body pure and undefiled’ and ‘raising sex-relations from the physical to the spiritual plane’.73 The main book distributed by the League of Isis was Swiney’s Bar of Isis, which is concerned with racial degeneration. Swiney blamed ‘a selfish, lustful, diseased manhood’ which ‘sought in woman only a body’.74 As a solution, men should obey to the Law of Nature, a married couple should only have between four and six children, and live chaste during pregnancy and for three years after (during lactation), so that women could effectively care for their children.75 Swiney supported her argument by citing the works of Caleb Saleeby and Reginald Ruggles Gates, two famous eugenicists. The pamphlets Racial Poisons, published by the League of Isis, dealt with specific poisons leading to racial degeneration which were connected to sexual intercourse: syphilis, gonorrhoea, alcohol (stimulating the sexual impulse and leading to ‘devious paths), nicotine (poisoning children through the smoking pregnant mother), and ‘dangerous employments’ 70 Frances Swiney, ‘Sublime Feminism’, in: Racial Problems 3 (Cheltenham: League of Isis, 1910-14), p. 3. 71 ‘The League of Isis: Rules of Observance’, in: Racial Problems 14 (Cheltenham: League of Isis, 1910-14) 72 ‘The League of Isis: Rules of Admission and Procedure’, in: Racial Problems 4 (Cheltenham: League of Isis, 1910-14) 73 Ibid. 74 Frances Swiney, The Bar of Isis (London: The Open Road Publishing, 1907), p. 43. 75 Ibid., p. 18. 28 (resulting in lead poisoning and destruction of the reproductive capabilities of both sexes).76 Poison Nr. 5 was called ‘The Racial Curse’; it dealt with the downfall of the British race due to Christianity, which ‘glorified and flourished the subjugation and degration of women’, because the husband could exercise his ‘rights’ on the wife during pregnancy.77 True religion is the knowledge of life. The religion that first desecrated the woman, the mother of all living, and subsequently ignored the feminine principle of life in its dogmas, was doomed to failure in the rudimentary ethics of natural law.78 Likewise, the Racial Problems Nr. 2 Man’s Necessity and Nr. 6 Law of Continence, as well as the pamphlet Responsibilities of Fatherhood are concerned with male sex obsession resulting in the devitalisation of the race. Sexual relations should be governed by the requirements of the mother and the child, not by men.79 They should lower their sexual instinct and work for the race together with women, so that the future womanhood can become motherhood.80 In the purpose of a race-regeneration, man should acknowledge the responsibilities of fatherhood, which he had neglected in favour of ‘personal gratification’.81 Swiney held male incontinence responsible for racial degeneration, the overrun of means of support for the population, and worsening economic conditions.82 Nevertheless, she intertwined her argument with a religious basis: There is no more divine and spiritualising influence than the love of two individuals for each other through a union of spiritual qualities. (…) The pure love of husband and wife, of father and mother, is akin to the Divine Fount of Life.83 Furthermore, this fact, as well as the ‘truth of primeval organic femininity’ should be taught to children.84 In particular, girls should be informed about ‘the initial purity and sacredness of sex relations’ and the ‘glory in her womanhood’, ‘that she is the sex, the standard type’.85 To summarise, Swiney’s League of Isis is the practical realisation of Swiney’s idea to regenerate the race by obeying to the Law of the Mother and it illustrates how Swiney interrelated Theosophy and biology in her plea for a sex reform. 76 Frances Swiney, Racial Poisons 1-4, 6 (Cheltenham: League of Isis, 1910-12) 77 Swiney, Bar of Isis, pp. 35 f. 78 Swiney, ‘Nr. 5 The Racial Curse’, in: Racial Poisons 1-4, 6 (Cheltenham: League of Isis, 1910-12), p. 45. 79 Swiney, Racial Problems Nr. 2 Man’s Necessity, p. 1. 80 Swiney, Racial Problems Nr. 6 Law of Continence, p. 4. 81 Frances Swiney, Responsibilities of Fatherhood (Cheltenham: League of Isis, 1912), p. 22. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., p. 23. 84 Swiney, Racial Problems Nr. 8 The Instruction of the Young in the Law of Sex, p. 12. 85 Ibid., p. 13. 29 This chapter critically engaged with Swiney’s use of theosophical ideas to examine her feminist agency in a religious and esoteric framework. It analysed in detail the concepts she adapted, such as specific interpretations of Gnosticism and Kabbalah, evolution and Egyptian religion, as well as the transgression of the perceived differentiation of religion and science. It became clear, that the discourses of motherhood and race, which have been examined in the previous chapter, influenced her theosophical feminism to the extent, that Swiney predominantly focussed on the Divine Mother – Isis – and the notion of motherhood in general. This illustrates the potential of Swiney’s individual feminist agency in a theosophical discourse which can already be seen as a feminist resistance against traditional Christianity. Nevertheless, this agency did not come from scratch, but was created and fed by the general historical context of British feminism. 30 4 ‘A Famous Champion of Her Sex’?1 – The Controversies In 1920, Swiney was praised by the Cheltenham WSS as ‘a Cheltenham Leader of the Women’s Movement (…) for all she has done for women’.2 According to them, it was impossible ‘to set a value to her work for women’.3 Likewise, her obituary celebrated Swiney’s ‘many works on various phases of the feminist problem’, which ‘made her name known in all parts of the world amongst those who have this subject at heart.’4 Contrastingly, she is little known today. Therefore, this chapter will look at Swiney’s perception, local and global, in secular and scientific as well as religious and esoteric discourses, to further analyse the forces which produces but at the same time restrict the individual and its impact. Swiney’s second book, The Awakening of Women (1899), is her most-read and most widely reviewed book. Every newspaper article dealing with Swiney gives credit to The Awakening of Women; it went through three editions, and was revised and enlarged over the next ten years.5 It was also embraced locally; it was one of two books which were given to the first woman prisoner of Cheltenham, Lilian Borovikovsky.6 Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy praised it in the Westminster Review as ‘one of the most remarkable books’, one ‘to do much good’7. It achieved a wide international readership and was reviewed in The Awakener, The Freewoman and The Woman’s Tribune.8 The latter described it as ‘the most philosophical and thoughtful contribution to the woman movement which has yet been issued’.9 In 1902, The Awakening of Women was translated into Dutch by Martina G. Kramers, with an introduction written by 1 ‘Death of Mrs. Rosa Frances Swiney: Famous Champion of her Sex’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 4 May 1922, p. 3. 2 ‘A Cheltenham Leader of the Women’s Movement’, in: The Cheltenham Looker-On, 7 February 1920, p. 18. 3 Ibid. 4 The Gloucestershire Echo, 4 May 1922, p. 3 5 ‘Woman the Creatrix. “The Bar of Isis”. New Work by Mrs. Swiney’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 7 May 1908; Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 168. 6 Sue Jones, Votes for Women: Cheltenham and the Cotswolds (Stroud: The History Press, 2018), p. 77; Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), p 29. 7 Ignota [Wolstenholme Elmy, Elisabeth], ‘The Awakening of Women’, in: Westminster Review, 152:1 (1899), p. 69; ‘The Awakening of Women’, in: Cheltenham Chronicle, 6 May 1899, p 8; 8 Dixon, p. 167. 9 The Woman’s Tribune, USA, quoted in: Frances Swiney, The Cosmic Procession or The Feminine Principle in Evolution (London: Ernest Bell, 1906) 31 Swiney.10 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, criticised the religious framework.11 Dutch theosophical feminists, however, approved of the ‘underlying theosophical premises’, namely the spiritual evolution which would result in women’s liberation.12 As demonstrated in the previous chapter, Swiney utilised the esoteric discourse on the Divine Mother to claim female superiority. So far, I agree with Dixon, who argued that Swiney’s emphasis on the Divine Feminine contradicts with the concept of the Divine Hermaphrodite. However, I do not agree with her concluding that Swiney, as a result, was an exceptional figure who had a ‘troubled relationship’ with the TS.13 Indeed, The Theosophical Review criticised 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 damaged by Swiney.14 Nevertheless, Swiney’s following works were positively reviewed by the TS. The Occult Review acknowledged Swiney’s combination of symbolism and biology in The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross15; The Theosophical Review commented that The Cosmic Procession shows that Swiney does excellent work for both causes, the women’s movement and Theosophy.16 Over the years, Swiney’s work became more theosophical and less scientific and Swiney remained a member until her death. Therefore, I do not identify a ‘troubled relationship’. I argue that Dixon’s conclusion results from the basic argument of her book, which is that the concept of the Divine Hermaphrodite, particularly, the idea of the unity in the duality (of the sexes) was the major reason for feminists to become Theosophists and vice versa. Swiney, who strongly opposed to the idea of duality, however, 10 Dieteren, Fia, ‘Kuisheid Omwille Van De Vooruitgang: De Alternatieve Evolutieleer van Frances Swiney’, in: Jaarboek Voor Vrouwengeschiedenis 20: Strijd om Seksualiteit (Amsterdam: Stichting beheer IISG, 2000), p. 134. Kramers and Swiney possibly met either at an international conference of the women’s movement (IWSA) or at international meetings of the Neo-Malthusian league. Kramers (1863-1934) was an active feminist, nationally (she was the secretary of the Dutch National Council of Women 1899-1903, and since 1902 board member of the Dutch women’s rights organisation; Vereeniging voor Vrouwenkiesrech) and internationally (since 1904 recording secretary of the International Alliance of Women, and, subsequently, 1905-1909 secretary of the IWSA). Kramers mainly fought for reformed sexual morals and was board member of the Dutch Neo-Malthusian League for several years. See: John Rylands Library, Manchester, IWSA/1/7/22: Biographies. 11 Dieteren, pp. 134 and 147. 12 Ibid., pp. 143f. and 147. 13 Dixon, p. 168 14 B. K., ‘Review of The Awakening of Women’, in: Theosophical Review, June 1899, p. 381, cited in: Dixon, p. 167. 15 A. E. Waite., ‘The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross. By Frances Swiney’, in: Occult Review, XXV:1 (1917), p. 60. 16 A. R. O., ‘Woman Leading On: The Cosmic Procession. By Frances Swiney’, in: Theosophical Review, 39 (1907), p. 476. 32 was not the only Theosophist who interpreted Blavatsky’s cosmogenesis in a way that favoured the feminine principle as the beginning and the end, and superior to the masculine.17 Some feminist Theosophists argued for the acknowledgement of the relationsip between the 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.18 After all, according to Blavatsky, the first emanation of the Absolute was the Divine Mother.19 Therefore, I argue that, even though Swiney’s emphasis on the Feminine Principle contradicted mainstream theosophical thought, theosophical feminists positively reviewed Swiney’s work and supported her argument. Anyway, Swiney was not primarily a Theosophist who argued for the woman cause, but a feminist who used Theosophy as a possibility to argue in a religious discourse. As such, Swiney influenced other feminist religious movements, in particular, the Panacea Society. The Panacea Society was founded by Mabel Barltrop, who was renamed Octavia by her followers, in 1919. Her followers declared Octavia to be the female messiah, the Daughter of God. She practiced healing and through this, the Panacea Society has reached more than 130,000 people globally.20 Octavia preached that God the Father has taken a step back, and as a result, there would be the need for a theological gender balance, which meant acknowledging the divine feminine mother and the possibility of a second, female messiah.21 As a result, it were mainly women who joined the society, similar to joining the TS, because they were allowed a greater role than in conventional religion.22 After a crisis in the TS, many members left and joined the Panacea Society in the 1920s.23 Octavia was generally open to theosophical ideas, as it becomes apparent in several letters she wrote on that matter.24 Octavia even invited Annie Besant, but such a meeting never took place.25 There were many suffragists in the inner circle of the Panacea Society, for instance Ellen Oliver, a friend and confident of Octavia.26 Oliver, who searched for 17 Frances Swiney, The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross (London: Open Road Publ., 1908), p. 13. 18 A. R. O, p. 476f. 19 H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I (London: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1888), p. 4. 20 Jane Shaw, Octavia, Daughter of God: The Story of Female Messiah and Her Followers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. ix. 21 Ibid., p. 41. 22 Ibid., p. 42. 23 Ibid. , p. 170ff. Shaw refers here to the Leadbeater crisis. 24 Letters from Octavia (Mabel Barltrop) (1924-1925), The Panacea Charitable Trust. 25 Letter from Octavia to Besant, 24 July 1924, The Panacea Charitable Trust; Shaw, pp. 170ff. 26 Shaw, p. 44. 33 evidence for the belief in a female saviour, sent Octavia The Awakening of Women. Oliver was mainly interested in Swiney’s notion that in Judaism the Divine Wisdom has been translated in a female gender and that the word Elohim supposedly was written in female plural, so it would represent the Divine Feminine.27 According to Jane Shawn, The Awakening of Women seems to have influenced Octavia, because since reading it, she believed in women’s evolutionary superiority which is portrayed in a female Messiah, herself.28 Apart from Cheltenham, where Swiney was a prominent figure, she constantly tried to reach an international audience, she participated at least once at the International Women’s Suffrage Alliances (IWSA), in 1909.29 Furthermore, the League of Isis had local secretaries in New York, South Africa, and India by 1912.30 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.31 ‘Each branch [should] enlist lecturers, hold public meetings, and distribute literature, and thus push the reform movement to the widest possible extent.’32 Unfortunately, it is hard to trace the League of Isis. No membership lists or minutes of meetings have survived.33 Scholars argue about the year of its foundation as well as how long it existed.34 I maintain that there is nothing to support the argument that the league existed before the year 1909. In February 1909, Swiney said an ‘international league is being formed’, indicating that it came into existence that very year.35 Between 1910 and 1914, Swiney’s pamphlets Racial Poisons, Racial Problems, and Racial 27 Letter from Oliver to Barltrop, 4 November 1918, The Panacea Charitable Trust. 28 Shaw, p. 46. 29 ‘Women’s Suffrage Society: Garden Fair’, in: Cheltenham Looker-On, 24 July 1909, p. 17. 30 ‘Press Opinions’, in: Racial Problems (Cheltenham: League of Isis, 1910-14) 31 ‘The League of Isis: Rules of Admission and Procedure’ 32 Ibid. 33 Robb, ‘Eugenics, Spirituality, and Sex Differentiation in Edwardian England’, p. 108. 34 According to Gordon and Doughan, Swiney founded it in 1907, and it did not last the First World War (Gordon and Doughan, p. 82); In 1997, George Robb said that it was founded in 1913, but in 1998, he agreed to the year 1907, however, advertisements in newspapers would suggest that the league was active until the 1920s (George Robb, ‘Race Motherhood: Moral Eugenics vs Progressive Eugenics, 1880-1920’, in: Claudia Nelson and Anna Summer Holmes (eds.), Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875-1925 (London: MacMillan, 1997), p. 64; Robb, ‘Eugenics, Spirituality, and Sex Differentiation in Edwardian England’, p. 108) 35 Frances Swiney, ‘The Bar of Isis’, in: The Hospital, 13 February 1909, p. 522. Apparently, Margaret Sibthorpe (1835-1916), editor of Shafts, a feminist journal ‘for progressive thought’ which featured regular updates on the woman cause by Wolstenholme Elmy as well as articles on Theosophy and feminism by Sibthorpe (see exemplarily: Shafts, February 1897 and July / September 1899), also co-founded the League of Isis. In this instance, scholarship agrees to the year 1909. (Stephanie Green, The Public Lives of Charlotte and Marie Stopes (London: Routledge, 2013)) 34 Curse; as well as revised editions of her previous books were published by the League of Isis. Furthermore, in 1910 and 1911, Votes for Women and the Common Cause advertised lectures of the league in London.36 The league presumably ceased to exist by the end of the First World War, since Swiney’s book The Ancient Road (1918) was not published by it anymore, and I could not trace any more meetings. Judging from the wide range of press responses, the League of Isis and the book The Bar of Isis were internationally known. The Indian Spectator said that everyone must agree with Swiney regarding the need for a ‘higher conception of sexual morality among civilised men’.37 The Indian Patriot agreed that the law of the mother is the law of life and the law of God, and it should be obeyed in order to uplift the race.38 The Canterbury Times (New Zealand) acknowledged the ‘deeper scientific truth’ in the pamphlet The Responsibilities of Fatherhood which should lead our lives, ‘as they must before evolution can advance farther’.39 Likewise, Votes for Women agreed that fatherhood must be taken as seriously as motherhood and ‘where man ceases to seek in woman only a body, the new life of the race will have begun’.40 According to them, this pamphlet showed the ‘usual cleanness and thorough understanding’ of Swiney’s subject.41 Votes for Women also commented on Racial Poisons Nr. 5 The Racial Curse. It would ‘set forth with scientific precision and convincing logic the reasons why purity and self-control in sex relations are of first importance both to the individual and the race’.42 According to Swiney, The American Baby Magazine, whose editor, Professor Starr Jordon, was president of the American Eugenics Society, had ‘freely quoted with approval’ from The Bar of Isis, and The Christian Commonwealth had ‘recommended it as one of the two best guides on the sex question’.43 The Awakener wished this book, written by ‘a teacher of the race’, would be in the hands of every man and woman.44 The Gloucestershire Echo, which regularly reviewed Swiney’s books, praised The Bar of Isis. Swiney was ‘well versed’ in a wide range of scientific literature and ‘dealt courageously with 36 ‘League of Isis’, in: Votes for Women, 11 November 1910, p. 95; ‘The League of Isis’, in: The Common Cause, 19 October 1911, p. 485. 37 The Indian Spectator, in: ‘Press Opinions’. 38 The Indian Patriot, in: ‘Press Opinions’. 39 The Canterbury Times, in: ‘Press Opinions’. 40 ‘Race Improvement’, in: Votes for Women, 20 September 2012, p. 814. 41 Ibid. 42 ‘The Racial Curse’, in: Votes for Women, 10 April 1914, p. 423. 43 ‘Note’, in: ‘Press Opinions’. 44 The Awakener, in: ‘Press Opinions’. 35 her topic’.45 It also commented on the revised edition of The Awakening of Women. This ‘now famous work’ would show Swiney’s ‘successful search for facts’ as well as her gift ‘of literary expression’.46 The Cheltenham Chronicle, however, criticised it for being written in ‘the semiscientific but untechnical style which is so popular in the present day’.47 In its review of The Cosmic Procession, The Gloucestershire Echo acknowledged Swiney’s combination of science and philosophy, gnostic transcendentalism and mysticism. However, even though they enjoyed Swiney’s ‘frank mode of expressing’ her thoughts, they were not quite convinced of the Eternal Feminine, nor would they ‘yearn for absorption in (…) an eternal anything’.48 The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross, so The Gloucestershire Echo, would succeed in combining the interpretation of symbols with modern embryology and other sciences. However, ‘points of criticism occur to one; but Mrs. Swiney’s views are always so refreshing and so straight forwardly stated that it is more interesting to summarise them than to attempt to find weak places in the reasoning’.49 These press reviews reveal a general praise of Swiney and her work regarding her view of motherhood, sexual relations, and the way to regenerate the race. They also favour Swiney’s scientific accuracy and the wide range of sources she used. However, whenever they do not agree to any notions of the Divine Feminine or the Feminine Principal in evolution, they positively referred to her style of writing. The same issue becomes apparent in Swiney’s relationship with the Eugenics Education Society. Apparently, she had been a member since its foundation, in 1907. As mentioned above, Swiney mainly used the works of Caleb Saleeby, a prominent member of the society, and Karl Pearson, who was asked to be president, for her eugenic arguments. Contrary to Robb’s statement that Swiney had been a founding member, she was excluded from the inner circle.50 In 1908, she was nominated for election into the council, but various members of the council had the opinion that Swiney’s views were too controversial for the society, so her name was rejected.51 45 ‘Woman the Creatrix. “The Bar of Isis”. New Work by Mrs. Swiney’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 7 May 1908. 46 Ibid. 47 Cheltenham Chronicle, 6 May 1899, p 8. 48 ‘Man the Throw-Off: To be Re-absorbed in the Eternal Feminine: Mrs. Swiney’s Remarkable New Book’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 5 November 1906, p. 4. 49 ‘”The Circle and the Cross” Mrs. Swiney on Female Supremacy: Another Remarkable Book’, in: The Gloucestershire Echo, 17 July 1908. 50 Robb, ‘Race Motherhood’, p. 59. 51 12 February 1908, Minutes Eugenics Education Society, SAEUG/L 36 The same ambivalence of perception is detectable in a personal context. In contrast to her positive review in the Westminster Review, cited above, Elisabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, whom Swiney met in the WEU, harshly criticised her work in letters she wrote to a friend. Elmy, McIlquham, and Swiney had been friends for some time, but Theosophy divided Swiney and the others.52 Elmy, like Swiney, was deeply involved in the scientific discourse of that time, and she also thought that the concept of evolution was about to bring the necessary changes in society.53 However, Elmy was married to a secularist who had ongoing controversies with Swiney about religion and secularism.54 In her letters, Elmy says The Awakening of Women has been written ‘hastily’, and ‘without first-hand knowledge’. Like Annie Besant, Swiney was ‘dreadfully hampered by religion’, and Elmy feared the next book could be even worse, which was a ‘pity, for she might have been a real power’.55 In 1921, Swiney was corresponding with Marie Stopes. Swiney had met Marie’s mother, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, in the WEU as well. In contrast to Charlotte, who fought for the vote and other public aspects of feminism, ‘eroticist’ Marie Stopes was interested in the private implications of feminism. In her opinion, women had the same sexual appetite as men, which is why her opponents denounced her as sexually deranged.56 Stopes became a prominent advocate of birth control, as shown in her book Married Love (1918).57 In 1911, she got married to eugenicist Reginald Gates, but the marriage got annulled in 1914 because of his sexual impotence.58 In January 1921, Swiney sent Stopes a letter and a copy of The Bar of Isis, and what followed over the next months was an ongoing debate on sexual relations. William Garrett detects their main difference in their oppositional view on seminal absorption.59 Stopes believed that through sexual intercourse, women could attain vital nutrients through the absorption of semen. Swiney, on the contrary, saw semen as the source of pollution and disease; any physical 52 Maureen Wright, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement: The Biography of an Insurgent Woman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 110. 53 Ibid., p. 2. 54 Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy Papers, Add. Mss. 47449-55, 17 January 1900, fol. 42. 55 Ibid.; Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy Papers, Add. Mss. 47449-55,.11 Dec 1899 fol. 34. 56 William Garrett (ed.), Marie Stopes: Feminist, Eroticist, Eugenicist: Essential Writings (San Francisco: Kenon Books, 2007), pp. ii, xii and xxi. 57 Ibid., p. ii. 58 Ibid., p. vi. 59 Ibid., p. xxxvii. 37 sexuality was not natural and would only serve the agenda of male dominance.60 Continence, so Swiney, was the conservation of vital forces within the body, which should not be wasted.61 However, I argue that their underlying different definitions of “scientific” was the reason for their disagreement. In their correspondence, Stopes accused Swiney of various biological misstatements and repeatedly asked for ‘scientific references’.62 Apparently, she only finished reading Swiney’s book, because of the personal connection between Swiney and Stopes’ mother.63 Swiney responded by quoting theosophical works. She said that within married life sex was not necessary, because of the satisfactory connection of the spirits.64 Stopes countered that her former legal husband, Gates, must have reached the further stage of Swiney’s desired feminine perfection, because he was not able to take her virginity. Since their marriage got annulled, Swiney’s idea would have to face problems with the law as well as with theology. Even the Catholic Church, with whom Stopes was in a lifelong war, would only regard a physically consumed marriage as legally binding.65 Evidently, Stopes had a different perception of “science” and its relation to religion than Swiney. Stopes’ feminism is characterised by the use of biological research and a concurrent denunciation of religious implications of female sexuality, whereas for Swiney, as typical for a Theosophist, philosophy, religion, and science were only variations of the universal truth. To conclude, this chapter has shown that Swiney was, in many respects, a prominent figure of her time. She was praised locally, as well as in feminist esoteric circles. Nevertheless, the debates surrounding Swiney’s work and her perception illustrated that, even though her work was valued for the cause of racial improvement and engagement with science, whenever it was reviewed by scientists (Eugenics Society), secularists (Wolstenholme Elmy), or both (Stopes), this transgression – this inherent identification of theosophy with science – was the point of criticism. Consequently, I argue that Swiney’s impact strongly depended on the context. Especially because Swiney eclectically combined various sources, as typical for a theosophical feminist, this is the reason for her low impact in feminist, eugenicist, or even not explicitly 60 Garrett, pp. xxxiv and xxxvii. 61 Swiney, Racial Problems Nr. 6 Law of Continence, p. 1. 62 24 January 1921 and 12 February 1921, letters Stopes to Swiney, Wellcome Library, PP/MCS/A/228. 63 24 January 1921, letter Stopes to Swiney. 64 February 1921, letter Swiney to Stopes. 65 8 March 1921, letter Stopes to Swiney; Garrett, p. x. 38 feminist esoteric circles. Furthermore, Swiney’s thoughts on sexual relations were created by the discourse of her time, a discourse which linked sexual relations to reproduction and the regeneration of the British race. In contrast, Marie Stopes’ feminism argued for a female sexuality which should not be restricted by the discourse on womanhood and motherhood of that time. Finally, the League of Isis can be seen as Swiney’s attempt to gain agency through an institution, as she had experienced through her memberships in the TS or the Cheltenham Ethical Society. The impact of the First World War might have been a reason that the league did not last. However, it was heavily centred on the individual Swiney. Judging from her book The Ancient Road (1918) and her letters to Stopes, Swiney’s effort in distributing and teaching the Law of the Mother had declined by then. It is not possible to say if this was a result of the end of the league or vice versa, but at any rate, both were inextricably linked. The league as well as her books are Swiney’s attempt to reach an audience and distribute her ideas. They are her agency. Nevertheless, Swiney’s case shows that an individual’s influence, no matter how low or high, is extremely depended on their context. In other words, the subject gets its agency from the discourse which constitutes the subject. When this context changes, the possibilities of agency change at the same time. 39 5 Conclusion The Mother, then, is the Supreme Unity, uniting all in Herself. It is not difficult why in the eternal sequence of things in evolution the human race is awakening to the truth of the Divine Feminine in the present stage of the world history. (…) Relatively speaking, the race, still in its immature youth, expelled the Mother from the nursery, and anarchy and chaos prevailed, (…). The evolved soul has always known that this intense craving for union once more with the Feminine Principle must be the first sign of the regenerate heart.1 Contemporary conceptions of motherhood and race, as this dissertation has shown, strongly influenced Frances Swiney, the Theosophist, feminist, and eugenicist. Furthermore, this imperial discourse of Victorian and Edwardian Britain not only created Swiney as a theosophical and feminist subject, it also made her own individual agency possible in the first place. This dissertation demonstrated how Swiney was influenced by the context of her time and, by using her agency, utilised the imperial notions of motherhood and race for her own theosophical feminist agenda. Therefore, ‘Mothers of the Race’ examined Swiney’s personal life in the light of being part of the upper middle-class in the British Empire, in other words: how the historical context shaped the individual Swiney. This personal imperial entanglement, as well as her personal connections to feminist activism in Cheltenham paved the path for her general feminist ideas. This chapter portrayed the contemporary discourse of a degenerating British race and the role of woman in this narrative. Swiney, like other feminists at that time, reversed the negative connotations of womanhood and motherhood and used it for her own argumentation, to fight for women’s enfranchisement. In doing so, she tried to escape the boundaries of being the Other in Victorian culture. Furthermore, she, as other imperial feminists, made herself into a subject in the discourse of the British Empire by arguing alongside its racial and imperial principles and, concomitantly, othering Indian women. Afterwards, ‘The Natural Law of Isis’ made clear that Swiney’s feminist emphasis on motherhood, race, and evolution also influenced her interpretations of Theosophy. This is the reason why Swiney focussed on one particular aspect of theosophical thought: the Divine Feminine, or the Divine Mother, as personated by the Goddess Isis, and her role in the cosmic process. Herein, Swiney’s theosophical concepts differ from mainstream Theosophy. This is evidence for her own, personal, feminist agenda within an esoteric framework. 1 Frances Swiney, The Ancient Road, or, The Development of the Soul (London: Bell and Sons, 1918), pp. 485ff. 40 Nevertheless, as ‘A Famous Champion of Her Sex?’ analysed, variations from general theosophical thought did not harm Swiney’s influence in esoteric circles. Indeed, it shows the broadness of these interpretations, which does not surprise, since the TS explicitly opposed to any kind of dogma. Swiney’s example illustrates how it was possible for feminists to not only argue within a religious framework, but also to utilise it for their own purposes. Moreover, this chapter examined Swiney’s perception in local and global networks of feminism and eugenics. I argued that it was easier for Swiney to have impact on and get positive response by those who were also concerned with the regeneration of the race and its implications for women and feminism. In contrast, any notions of religion or esotericism were ignored or criticised by those who opposed to religious frameworks. To conclude, this dissertation examined the possibilities and restrictions of an individual, feminist agency in the imperial and religious discourse of late Victorian and Edwardian England. Through a biographical approach it was possible to fill a historiographical gap by using Swiney as an example of a theosophical feminist. This added to the works of Dixon, Burfield, and Kraft, who examined the influence of the TS on British first wave feminism. My case study showed that Swiney’s imperial context influenced her perception and interpretation of Theosophy and, therefore, her theosophical feminism. Furthermore, Theosophy, and esotericism in general, were deeply embedded in the discourse of Britain’s First Wave Feminism, as it is evident especially by the vast number of theosophical feminists. However, this is also a topic which resulted in high controversies. As Schwartz contends, religion was the ground on which feminism had to argue.2 No matter if feminists opposed religious concepts of womanhood or used esoteric argumentations for their feminism, the religious discourse was not possible to avoid. However, because this was such a highly debated field, Swiney’s impact was limited in regard to those who were opposed to notions of religion or esotericism, as the examples in chapter four have illustrated. In addition to analysing the impact of the feminist discourse of that time had on Swiney’s theosophical feminism, this dissertation examined the consequences being a theosophical feminist had on Swiney’s impact as a feminist in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It showed that the influence of esoteric movements, such as the Theosophical Society, on British feminism cannot be understood without analysing the specific historical context which produced the theosophical feminist individual, like Frances Swiney. 2 Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), passim. 41 As indicated by my research, Swiney was personally connected to various prominent and important figures of her time, such as Charlotte Despard, Harriet McIlquham, Charlotte Stopes, Margaret Sibthorpe, and Annie Besant. Additionally, Swiney is an example of the personal overlap of numerous (middle and upper class) organisations, such as the Higher Thought Centre in London, the Cheltenham Ethical Society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, as well as the Cheltenham Food Reform and Health Association. Future research can further investigate these connections to illuminate the extent of the Theosophical Society’s personal and institutional impact on twentieth century Britain, even beyond First Wave Feminism. 42 Bibliography Figures: Figure 1: Cheltenham Chronicle and Gloucestershire Graphic, 29 April 1911, printed in: Jones, Sue, Votes for Women: Cheltenham and the Cotswolds (Stroud: The History Press, 2018) Figure 2: Unknown Photographer, The Women’s Library, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb9780198614128-e-41247?mediaType=Image (accessed 25 August 2018) Figures 3 and 4: Frances Swiney, The Mystery of the Circle and the Cross (London: Open Road Publ., 1908) Figure 5: http://tarot-de-marseille-millennium.com/english/tarot_millennium_edition.html (accessed 17 August 2018) Primary Sources: Archival Sources: British Library: Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy Papers, Add. Mss. 47449-55. 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