THE LIES THAT ALBERT LEIGHTON RAWSON SAID ABOUT BLAVATSKY

(This article was written by John Patrick Deveney and published in the Theosophical History, Vol. X, No. 4, October 2004, link)

 

 

 

The Travels of H.P. Blavatsky and the Chronology of Albert Leighton Rawson: An Unsatisfying Investigation into H.P.B.’s Whereabouts in the Early 1850s.

 

 

One of our only sources for the events of H.P. Blavatsky’s life before she appeared in New York in the 1870s —excluding, of course, her own conflicting accounts— is Albert Leighton Rawson (October 15, 1829 - November 15, 1902), a man whose stories of H.P.B.’s Eastern adventures served not only to establish her bona fides in the face of assertions that she was an adventuress but also to buttress her claims (and by reflection his own) to initiation and to intimate familiarity with the East.

 

H.P.B. returned the favor by vouching for Rawson as an initiate of the “Brotherhood of Lebanon.” It was a mutual admiration relationship that shored up the reputations of both and —at least in his case— served to cover over an embarrassing gap in his resume.

 

In 1878 Rawson wrote to the Spiritualist of London to controvert a letter from Mrs. Frederica Showers that questioned whether H.P.B. had ever even been in the East:

 

“In my visits to the Levant, her name has been frequently met with, in Tripolis, Beirut, Deir el Kamer, Damascus, Jerusalem, and Cairo. She was also well known to a merchant at Jiddah, who had a ring with her initials, which he said was a present to him from her. His servant, a camel-driver formerly, says he was a dragoman and camelji to Madame Blavatsky from Jiddah to Mecca. I inquired of the Shereef of Mecca, but heard nothing of her there. She may have been incog. while there for prudential reasons. ⁽¹⁾ My visit was made as a Mohammedan divinity student, and secretary to Kamil Pasha, ⁽²⁾ in whose company I journeyed.”

* * *

“There is no doubt in my mind that Madame Blavatsky was made acquainted with many, if not quite all, of the rites, ceremonies and instruction practiced among the Druzes of Mount Lebanon in Syria, for she speaks to me of things that are only known by the favored few who have been initiated.” ⁽³⁾

 

Notice how nicely this defense is organized. It is a work of art and a classic piece of rhetorical misdirection. Without once saying that he had known or even met H.P.B. in the Near East, and without mentioning a single date that might be checked, Rawson manages to list a plethora of mysterious Eastern places (including Mecca!) where her indisputable traces had been found — thereby staking out and proving his own claim to have been there as well. At the same time he vouches for her acquaintance with “many, if not quite all” —a delicious phrase— of the mysteries of the Druzes, thereby condescendingly establishing her initiation while simultaneously proving his own superior one. The phrase must have galled H.P.B. ⁽⁴⁾

 

Rawson’s most fascinating statement of H.P.B.’s early exploits is his “Madame Blavatsky: A Theosophical Occult Apology” (1892) ⁽⁵⁾ in which he has H.P.B. in Cairo in her youth telling a Countess Kazenoff of her investigations assisted by an “American artist,” in the course of which the two young adventurers, both disguised as Muslims, sought out and consulted Shayk Yusuf ben Makerzi, the snake charmer, and Paulos Metamon, the Coptic magician. Rawson then goes on:

 

“An attempt to form a society for occult research at Cairo failed, and Metamon advised delay.

 

Madame visited Paris on her way to New York, and compared notes with Thevenot, Grand Secretary of the Grand Orient of France, and astonished that very learned and highly advanced Freemason by her knowledge of the secrets of the degrees in one branch to the Thirty-third, and in another to the Ninety-fifth. ⁽⁶⁾ In 1853 she came to New York and made a few acquaintances, nearly all of whom continued her friends to the last.”

* * *

“She had tried hashish in Cairo with success, and she again indulged in it in this city under the care of myself and Dr. Edward Sutton Smith, ⁽⁷⁾ who had had a large experience with the drug among his patients at Mount Lebanon, Syria.” ⁽⁸⁾

 

These are fascinating but far from straightforward passages. The intimation is clear enough that the unnamed “American artist” is intended to be understood as Rawson himself, though the assertion is never made explicitly and the conclusion is not without problems — most notably the failure of Rawson in his earlier letter to the Spiritualist to include himself in the list of those who had personally known H.P.B. in the East.

 

If he is not the artist and Oriental traveler intended, however, there is no foundation or source apparent for the events he relates seemingly from his own first-hand knowledge, and it becomes necessary to posit a second, identical “American artist” in violation of Occam’s principle. ⁽⁹⁾

 

Rawson was an artist and a fair one at that, with a recognizable name from the late 1860s on as an illustrator of Bible lands and themes — an expertise that is all the more surprising because he was an utter freethinker and despised Christianity. ⁽¹⁰⁾ Limiting ourselves to Rawson’s own statements, then, there is only one way to parse his statements chronologically:

 

• H.P.B.’s pilgrimage to Mecca.

• Rawson’s pilgrimage to Mecca, disguised as a medical student.

• H.P.B.’s and Rawson’s investigations of the Cairo magicians.

• H.P.B.’s encounter with Thévenot in Paris (possibly in the company of Rawson).

• Then H.P.B.’s trip to New York in 1853, where she arrives either with Rawson or where she takes up with him again after her arrival, and where they, with Dr. Smith, experiment with hashish.

 

This scenario of the two travelers in the Near East in 1851 or 1852 (or, at any rate, before 1853) ties in nicely with another statement of Rawson’s describing his “personal acquaintance with her that extended over forty years” ⁽¹¹⁾ Taking this literally and coupling it with the fact that H.P.B. died in 1891, Rawson’s claim has to be that he met her about 1851, presumably somewhere in the Near East.

 

Again, the chronology ties in with the standard nineteenth-century biographical work on Rawson which states (obviously based on material that he himself supplied): “After studying law, theology, and art, he [Rawson] made four visits to the Orient, and in 1851-‘2 made a pilgrimage from Cairo to Mecca with the annual caravan disguised as a Mohammedan student of medicine.” ⁽¹²⁾

 

So, basing ourselves only on Rawson (or on sources that are derived from Rawson’s own account), we have the two travelers in the Near East in 1851-1852, separately making the pilgrimage to Mecca a year or so apart and then together investigating the Cairo magicians, with H.P.B. at least (and perhaps Rawson) then passing through Paris, meeting Grand Secretary Thévenot, and arriving in New York in 1853. ⁽¹³⁾

 

 

Is any of this true?

 

Since it has proved impossible over the last hundred years to substantiate H.P.B.’s own stories of her travels, perhaps we can approach the problem from the other direction and arrive at the truth through an examination of Rawson’s biography. This is not a simple endeavor, but it may serve to shed some light on the problem.

 

First of all, the clean-cut chronology set forth above, with H.P.B. and Rawson traveling in the Near East in 1851-1852, is pure fiction and easily demonstrated to be such by the fact that from September 15, 1851 to June 22, 1852, Rawson was in prison in New Jersey for theft. ⁽¹⁴⁾ In the earlier months of 1851 before his arrest he was similarly unavailable since he “married” Sarah J. Lord somewhere in New England in May 1851, and before that, in 1850, as his friend and fellow artist William

H. Titcomb relates, he was peacefully living in Massachusetts. ⁽¹⁵⁾

 

It is easily understandable that Rawson might have wanted to cover over a suspiciously blank period in his curriculum vitae (when he was in fact in jail) by shifting later events back to the missing months, and this must be the explanation for the claim that “in 1851-‘2 [he] made a pilgrimage from Cairo to Mecca.” But this sleight-of-hand, while it may put us on the alert to detect other mystifications by Rawson, does not necessarily mean that the entire story is false. It is completely understandable that a young man in a situation such as Rawson’s might seek anonymity abroad while the scandal of his imprisonment grew dim, and perhaps the events alleged to have occurred in 1851-1852 did take place, but only after he emerged from prison in June 1852.

 

Is that possible given what we know of his life?

 

We can learn a fair amount about Rawson’s whereabouts in the period from sworn statements and exhibits introduced by his wife Mary in her action in 1864 to obtain a divorce from him on the grounds, inter alia, that he had previously been married to Sarah Lord in Massachusetts and never been divorced.

 

The complaint in the action avers that Mary “is informed and believes” (that is, that she did not have personal knowledge) “that the character of the said defendant [Rawson] after his discharge from the state Prison as aforesaid was very bad in a moral point of view, that during the years between 1853 and 1858 he resided at and in the vicinity of the City of Boston” ⁽¹⁶⁾ — an allegation that indicates, at least, that Rawson never told Mary of any extended trip abroad during the period in which he was married to Sarah.

 

Rawson’s friend William Titcomb swears that “I first became acquainted with Albert L. Rawson about the year 1850. He was then a single man boarding with a Mr. Beebee in Cambridge. In the fall of 1850 he went to Chelsea and was married in the spring of 1851 to Sarah J. Rawson. Soon after that he went to the West and returned to Cambridge about the year 1853.”

 

Sarah’s brother, James H. Lord, states that Sarah and Rawson “commenced to live together about the month of May, 1851, at my father’s house in South Reading, Massachusetts. . . . They resided in my father’s family in this manner for about three months, and left and went to New York. They returned from New York, and commenced keeping house at Medford, where they remained two or three years. I last saw Albert L. Rawson at Medford about 1857.” (As the following two documents make clear, this ambiguous statement means that for the two or three years preceding 1857 the couple were living in Medford; before that, the affiant believed that they were in New York.)

 

In June 1856 Rawson was traveling in Vermont, lecturing and trying to sell his paintings, and writing to his wife Sarah who was at their home, probably in Medford, Massachusetts. ⁽¹⁷⁾ He tells her touchingly to “kiss Bub [his young son Arthur] for his pa,” which indicates that at the latest Arthur had been born in May or June 1856 and that Rawson had been home to assist in conceiving him at some time in September or October 1855 or before.

.

In April 1857, he was in New York City, on a lengthy trip from city to city on the East Coast to sell his artwork, and again wrote to Sarah in Medford. ⁽¹⁸⁾

 

From the summer of 1859 until the spring of 1864, Rawson was courting his second wife, Mary, in upstate New York, marrying her in June 1860, and then living with her in Syracuse, where he fathered two girls, one born in June 1861 (indicating his presence there in September or October 1860) and one in April 1864 (indicating his presence there in June or July 1863).

 

 

To these meager statements from the divorce file we can add a few additional details:

 

In August 1855 Rawson was probably at Tufts College in Massachusetts where he drew a commemorative picture of the celebration of the school’s dedication ceremony on August 22^nd. ⁽¹⁹⁾

 

In 1858, he exhibited his work for the first time at the National Academy of Design at its then-new Building on 10^th Street in New York City. ⁽²⁰⁾

 

And finally, for some extended time in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, Rawson was living in New York City where he frequented Pfaff’s Cellar, a basement saloon, in the company of the other denizens of America’s first Bohemia: Walt Whitman, George Arnold, Josh Billings, Mark Twain, Petroleum V. Nasby, Artemis Ward, Henry Clapp, Count Adam de Gurowski, Albert Brisbane, Stephen Pearl Andrews, the Turkish Consul Oscanyan Bey, the scintillating Ada Clare and her friend Anna Ballard. ⁽²¹⁾

 

 

In all of this there is no mention of a trip to the Near East or indeed of any extended trip at all, although the standard biographical sources on Rawson relate that he “also explored the Indian mounds of the Mississippi valley, and visited Central America in 1854-‘5” ⁽²²⁾ — a trip that may coincide in some way with H.P.B.’s own claim to Sinnett to have visited the same areas in a slightly earlier period. ⁽²³⁾

 

A close examination of the dates makes it apparent that there are two periods during the 1850s in which Rawson was thought to have gone “to the West” or “to New York” —out of sight of his in-laws and friends— or in which his whereabouts are unknown or unstated. The first of these was 1852-1853, during the first part of which Rawson was still in prison, a fact he certainly would have tried to keep from his friends. The second is from mid-1857 until 1858.

 

Before considering whether Rawson visited the Near East during one or both of these periods, it is important to understand that a “normal” trip from New York to the Near East, unembellished with lengthy side travels, would have taken from six months to a year or more in the period before steam travel became common in the 1860s, and a minimum of six months thereafter. ⁽²⁴⁾

 

To this must be added four months or so for the pilgrimage to Mecca, ⁽²⁵⁾ supposing it to have occurred, and another month or two for Rawson’s initiation by the Druzes — if he is telling the truth about that and if the initiation took place at this time and not later. ⁽²⁶⁾

 

In this busy period of the 1850s as jail bird, family man, Bohemian and traveling artist, there are at least some indications that Rawson found the six months to a year necessary to travel at least once to Europe and the Near East, and perhaps twice. In the Twelfth Annual Proceedings of the Ancient Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (1886), Rawson translated and published a letter from a certain Zoolfikar Fauzee of Cairo. The writer inquires:

 

“I wonder if you will recognize the name of your present correspondent. He had the honor of sitting by your side in the school of Fickee Hoseyn ibn El-Homam, at the College (Madrasay) of El-Azhar, Cairo, thirty-three years ago, and chanting the Fathah in chorus with the whole class.” ⁽²⁷⁾

 

The letter is dated April 1886, which, if it is exact (and the precision of 33 years indicates that the writer is trying to be exact), would place Rawson (at least) in Cairo in the spring of 1853. This 1853 visit in turn may be supported by Rawson’s claim in one of the standard biographical dictionaries to have published an otherwise unknown and unfindable book entitled Vocabularies and Dictionaries of Arabic, Persian and Turkish, possibly the product of this trip, in 1854. ⁽²⁸⁾

 

If there is any truth at all to the story that Rawson visited Mecca, the pilgrimage must have taken place on this trip. The culmination of the Hajj (the visit to Mount Arafat) takes place on the 9th day of DhulHijah, the twelfth month of the Muslim year, a date that in 1853 occurred on September 13^th — a fact well known because Captain Richard Francis Burton also made the pilgrimage in 1853, disguised as a Pathan physician from India, a tale that, in the most cynical view, inspired Rawson’s claim. ⁽²⁹⁾

 

Since the Muslim calendar is a lunar one, which causes the Hajj to fall eleven days earlier each year, and since H.P.B. had seemingly been to Mecca before him, she would, in this scenario, have been in Mecca either in the beginning of September 1852 or in late August 1851, or at corresponding times in still earlier years.

 

So, with an adjustment of dates to compensate for his time as a guest of the State of New Jersey, the story told by Rawson about the adventures in Cairo of H.P.B. and the American artist and about her subsequent passage through Paris on her way to New York seems to fit into the first of the blank periods in Rawson’s chronology, 1852-1853.

 

 

But what about Thévenot?

 

This luminary, according to Rawson’s story, as you will recall, was the “Grand Secretary of the Grand Orient” whom H.P.B. supposedly astonished in Paris with her knowledge of elevated Masonic lore. Unfortunately for Rawson’s story, however, Thévenot only became chef du secrétariat du Grand Orient in 1860.

 

The position of Grand Secretary in most English-speaking Masonic jurisdictions is a privileged and elevated one. In the French Grand Orient of the 1850s the closest approximation in point of view of Masonic rank was the “chef du secrétariat,” a person of considerable power, since his position was usually permanent while more exalted Grand Orient officers came and went more frequently at the whim of Masonic politics.

 

In 1851, an upstart by the name of A.M. Hubert succeeded in becoming chef du secrétariat, replacing a certain Pillot who had held the position for 20 years. ⁽³⁰⁾ Hubert lasted until early 1853, when he was in turn ousted and replaced as chef by a man named Claude, who held the position at least through 1855. ⁽³¹⁾

 

After Claude’s departure, the position seems to have been vacant, and it is only in that situation, in 1858, that Thévenot’s name appears, not as chef du secrétariat, but rather as “1er commis.” — that is, as premier commissionnaire (chief agent or clerk) of the secrétariat. Thévenot finally became chef du secrétariat in 1860 and continued in the position at least until 1877. ⁽³²⁾

 

Thévenot, accordingly, was in no official position in 1853 to be astonished by H.P.B. as she passed through Paris on her way to New York, and Rawson’s simple chronology, if we are to salvage some part of his tale, must accordingly be “adjusted” not only to take into account his time in jail but also to do something with Thévenot.

 

There is one final piece of the chronology of this period that may be of some assistance here. In Rawson’s obituary of Benjamin Perley Poore, ⁽³³⁾ a friend and fellow member of the Ancient Arabic Order Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, he says:

 

“In 1858, in Paris, France, in company with this writer, he [Poore] was made a member of the four Scottish Rite bodies, through the friendly services of Grand Secretary Thevenot. His elevation to the 33° was nobly earned and gracefully received.” ⁽³⁴⁾

 

Poore was very well known as a journalist and Washington insider and, since many people presumably would have been familiar with his life and ready to correct misstatements, Rawson’s claim of being in Paris in 1858 has the ring of truth, despite the fact that Thévenot was only a commissionnaire of the secrétariat at the time. ⁽³⁵⁾

 

If, as seems likely, Rawson was in fact in Paris in 1858 as he claims and was there at a time when Thévenot was at least connected with the secrétariat du Grand Orient, we must consider the consequences for H.P.B.’s biography. Can we salvage something of her astonishing Grand Secretary Thévenot in 1853 (which has proven to be impossible to sustain) by moving that event forward to 1858 (when Rawson was there dealing with the same dignitary), or should we perhaps transpose the whole sequence of events in 1853 (Mecca, Cairo, magicians, Paris, New York) forward to that latter year?

 

In other words, did the trip on which H.P.B. “visited Paris on her way to New York, and compared notes with Thevenot, Grand Secretary of the Grand Orient of France” really occur in 1858?

 

We do know from other sources that H.P.B. herself was in Paris in 1858, because that is the period when she became familiar with, though never met, the medium D.D. Home, ⁽³⁶⁾ and it is tempting to manipulate Rawson’s dates (which, as we have seen, are flexible in any case) to conflate the two visits to Thévenot and place them in 1858.

 

Given the obscurity of Thévenot, laboring away, as I picture him, in a cubicle in the bowels of the Grand Orient, rather like an underpaid clerk from one of Dickens’ darker novels, it has always struck me as improbable that anyone would single him out for a visit — much less that two people who knew each other well and had traveled together would each have sought him out separately, on different occasions five years apart.

 

To pursue the first branch of this hypothesis — that Rawson has for some reason transposed to 1853 the whole series of events (Mecca, Cairo, magicians, Paris, Thévenot, New York) that really occurred five years later, in 1858 — we must examine a bit more closely Rawson’s own chronology to see whether he in fact ever visited the Near East in the period 1857-1858 when he seems to have visited Paris. As we have seen above, the general chronology of the events of his life does seem to allow for such a trip in the period 1857-1858, but the question still remains whether he in fact made it.

 

To answer this, we must ascertain how many times Rawson in fact visited the Near East. As in all of questions examined here, however, that issue is not a simple one. The standard biographical sketches of Rawson, published from the late 1870s on, recite that Rawson made four trips to the Orient. ⁽³⁷⁾

 

H.P.B. writing in 1877 vouches for this number and for his trip to Mecca and adds that Rawson spent “many years” in the East — a claim frequently made but hard to justify given the chronology outlined above:

 

“Outside the East we have met one initiate (and only one), who, for some reasons best known to himself, does not make a secret of his initiation into the Brotherhood of Lebanon. It is the learned traveller and artist, Professor A.L. Rawson, of New York City. This gentleman has passed many years in the East, four times visited Palestine, and has travelled to Mecca.” ⁽³⁸⁾

 

Rawson himself claimed in 1879: “I have ⁽³⁹⁾ been pretty well over this country, seen the best parts of Europe, and made four journeys to Egypt and Palestine.” ⁽⁴⁰⁾

 

 

If these four trips actually happened —and there are problems with the assertion ⁽⁴¹⁾— when did they occur?

 

We know or can deduce with fair certainty that, in addition to the possible trips in 1852-1853 and in 1857-1858 that we are discussing here, Rawson was also in the Near East in the summer of 1874 ⁽⁴²⁾ and seems to have been there again at some period during the 1860s, ⁽⁴³⁾ probably in 1866-1868. ⁽⁴⁴⁾

 

So, if Rawson had made four trips to the Near East in the relevant period, as he and H.P.B. say, the trips must be 1852-1853, 1857-1858, 1866-1868 and 1874 — a chronology that would, at least as a matter of logic, permit the Mecca-Cairo-magicians-Paris-Thévenot-New York chain of events to have occurred during the second trip, in 1857-1858.

 

However, while this solution would at least resolve the problem of Thévenot after a fashion —he did at least have some connection with the secrétariat in 1858— it creates other and I believe insurmountable problems. The most significant of these is the fact, well-established by her family, that H.P.B. in 1858 did not go on from Paris to New York to experiment with hashish with Rawson and Dr. Smith, but instead returned to Russia to astonish her family with the tricks of spiritualism and table-turning.

 

What about transposing only the Paris trip and encounter with Thévenot to 1858?

 

Again, from a purely logical point of view and given the chronology outlined here, it would be possible to mix and match, to take the lump of Rawson’s story that has proven impossible to digest in 1852-1853 (H.P.B.’s visit to Thévenot) and move it to 1857-1858 where it might more easily find a home, leaving untouched in 1853 the Cairo adventures and the trip to New York. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

 

This exercise has the beauty of explaining the utter improbability that two travelers who had known each other at length and with some intimacy in Cairo and New York (and perhaps in the American Southwest, Mexico and Central America) should both just happen to be in Paris in the same year, unbeknownst to each other, while one seeks out the obscure Freemason that the other had (according Rawson) visited five years before. All of this is beguiling, but it is not history.

 

 

 

 

CONCLUSION

 

Jurors in America are instructed in their deliberations with the old legal maxim, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus  —a liar in one matter is a liar in all— and are permitted, but not required, to disbelieve anything, even if uncontradicted, said by a person found to have given false testimony. The maxim is a safe but barren guide to dealing with H.P.B.’s biographical fictions and Rawson’s tales, but if it were strictly applied to the questions discussed here it would lead us to reject Rawson’s accounts entirely.

 

Albert Leighton Rawson was false in his dates (to cover his time in prison); he was almost certainly false about the pilgrimages to Mecca; and he was false for reasons that are not clear in his story of H.P.B. and Thévenot, ⁽⁴⁶⁾ and we would certainly be justified in rejecting his entire account — losing at one swoop all that for years we thought we knew about the young American artist, Paulos Metamon, the snake charmer and hashish in the New York of the 1850s.

 

This wholesale rejection seems extreme and unjustified here, however, despite the fact that any historical methodology that rejects only assertions proven to be lies while keeping the remainder rests on shaky ground, since any new discovery at any time may falsify yet another claim asserted in the liar’s testimony. We do not have the comfort here, however, of dealing with an honorable man, whose errors are lapses of memory or perception.

 

Given the poverty of our sources we must take witnesses to H.P.B.’s life as we find them, warts and all, or abandon the whole endeavor. Rawson is not a perfect witness — far from it. He was a scoundrel, but he seems to have been a scoundrel with direct knowledge of the events he relates and the opportunity —if we adjust his chronology to the period 1852-1853 and ignore Thévenot— to have witnessed those events, and even the stumbling block of H.P.B.’s encounter with Thévenot in 1853 may possibly be avoided if we assume (yet another assumption!) that Rawson used the title “Grand Secretary” for Thévenot because that worthy later became chef du secrétariat.

 

So, perhaps something remains of Rawson’s tale after all, though the assumptions and adjustments we are forced to make in order to account for the assertions known to be false must leave us with doubt about the whole story and with a compelling, lingering suspicion that we are missing something crucially important in the relationship between Rawson and H.P.B. and in H.P.B.’s biography generally.

 

Very clearly, there is something going on here that neither H.P.B. nor Rawson wanted revealed — something, therefore, of great importance to us as historians. “Quod tanto impendio absconditur, etiam solummodo demonstrare destruere est” (Tertullian; epigraph to Le Compte de Gabalis, 1671): “Even to mention what is hidden with such care is to destroy it.”

 

This excursion through the minutiae of Rawson’s biography in the 1850s should serve, if for nothing else, both as a caution against accepting standard claims about H.P.B.’s life and as a goad to further, detailed, research.

 

- - -

 

I wish to thank the staff of the Chancellor Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library and Museum in New York, of which I have the honor of being a trustee, and especially Mr. Tom Savini, the Director, and Ms. Georgia Hershfeld, the Librarian, whose help has been invaluable in preparing this paper.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NOTES

 

1. It is a telling indication of the intentions of H.P.B.’s biographers that those favorably inclined toward her mine Rawson’s reminiscences for Paulos Metamon, the Druzes, et alios, while the more critical use him to prove her hashish use. Almost all, however, ignore his assertion of her pilgrimage to Mecca, apparently balking at the claim — with good reason.

 

2. There were many Ottoman dignitaries of the name and title at the time and it is impossible to determine which might be meant here. The implication of the story is that Rawson could pass undetectable among the lands and peoples of the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, an implication that cannot be true for other than a short time. Captain Richard Burton, discussed below, who made the Hajj in 1853, had to be constantly on his guard to avoid detection and he had lived for years in the East by that time and was already fluent in many of the languages. Rawson in 1852 was a 23-year-old with an education (if the biographical material he supplied to the standard dictionaries was correct) that leaned more toward Free Baptist Divinity studies than to oriental languages and cultures, with the possible exception of Biblical Hebrew.

 

3. Albert Leighton Rawson, “Two Madame Blavatskys – The Acquaintance of Madame H.P. Blavatsky with Eastern Countries,” Spiritualist 12/14 (April 5, 1878): pp. 165-166, reprinted in Theosophical History 3/1 (January 1989): pp. 27-30.

 

4. Rawson’s attitude toward H.P.B. is complex and not at all straightforward or what might be expected. He was certainly in no way a follower or disciple of H.P.B., and openly despised those who were, especially Olcott, as dupes and opportunists, involved for the money or reflected prestige. With regard to H.P.B. herself, Rawson is more ambivalent. Her public persona and her wonderworking from the New York days is dismissed as simple trickery and “glamour,” the acts of a precocious person tweaking of the noses of the ignorant and delighting in pulling the wool over the eyes of the masses, but behind this scoffing is a recognition that H.P.B. for her own undisclosed reasons was really up to something serious that he was aware of but did not believe or share in. His attitude is that of a person who has known a celebrity before her fame, warts and all. Undoubtedly intermingled with this is an element of jealousy because he had not achieved the fame that had befallen her. Whatever their mutual secrets may have been, and whatever the true story of their encounters and relationship, Rawson carried his knowledge to his grave. On Rawson’s attitude to H.P.B., see the articles cited in the text and his “Theosophical Thanks,” Freethinkers’ Magazine 9/12 (December 1891): 701-709 (“The occult way is much more wonderful. An ordinary jeweler makes a brooch by the use of tools; Madame Blavatsky makes the same piece of jewelry by the use of fools; the difference is indicated by the letters, F. and T., which are the badge of the Fellowship of the Theosophical Society. . . . The esoteric brothers only know those letters mean fools and tools. * * * I hereby earnestly and sincerely protest against the habit some people have of calling Theosophy flapdoodle, bosh, stuff and nonsense. It grieves me as a  Theosophist who has been a diligent student from the beginning. I know that flapdoodle is not Theosophy, although some pretend it is, and that it is only a means of notoriety and of feathering the nests of certain birds whose classification is not to be found in any respectable work on ornithology.”).

 

5. A.L. Rawson, “Mme. Blavatsky: A Theosophical Occult Apology,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 33 (February 1892); pp. 199-209, reprinted in Theosophical History 2/6 (April 1988): 209-220.

 

6. The reference to the thirty-third degree is to the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, and that to the ninety-fifth degree is to the Rite of Memphis, a fringe rite propagated by Jacques Etienne Marconis (1795-1868), a Masonic adventurer with a speckled career. The history of the rite is as complex and contradictory as H.B.P.’s own history and is beyond the scope of this paper, but in 1853 it was completely outside the scope of the Grand Orient’s jurisdiction and practically moribund. The connections of H.P.B. and her New York friends of the 1870s (Sotheran, Rawson, Weisse, et al.) with the rite in its later transformations are discussed in my “Ozymandias: Why Do We Do What We Do? Some Ruminations on Theosophical History, Curiosity, Diligence and the Desire to Penetrate the Veil and Find the Inside of History; or, An Attempt to Explain the Feeling that The Truth Is Out There and Lies in the Details” in Keeping the Link Unbroken: Theosophical Studies Presented to Ted G. Davy on His Seventy-fifth Birthday, edited by Michael Gomes (TRM, 2004): 1-22.

 

7. Dr. Smith is a mystery. Given the reference to his practice near Mount Lebanon, he was almost certainly an American missionary physician, but there is no record of him in Yale University’s extensive mission records or in the records of the Presbyterian Historical Society in Philadelphia. Finally, Smith does not appear in Arthur W. Hafner, ed., Directory of Deceased American Physicians: 1804-1929 (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1993), which gives the obituary notices of all American physicians who were members of the American Medical Association. He did exist, however. See “Departures for Europe,” New York Times, September 10, 1879, 2.

 

8. It is clear that this experimenting with hashish in New York is intended by Rawson to be understood as happening on the 1853 trip rather than in the 1870s, because he speaks in the same context of the success of this “charming young widow of twenty-two or three” in society. The use of the phrase “under the care of” to describe the relationship between H.P.B. and Rawson in her use of hashish is another subtle effort by Rawson to demonstrate his superior status. Some understanding of his intentions in caring for H.P.B. in her experiments with hashish may be gleaned from his story of introducing the scientist John Tyndall (whom H.P.B. opposed because of his materialism) to hashish and opium in London in 1874. The goal, apparently, was ecstasy. “I described the practice of those ascetics who seek communion with the Supreme in ecstasy, and [Tyndall] said he would do anything in reason to enjoy a taste of the beatific vision of which he had read so much. In a spirit of fun I said nothing reasonable was needed, but rather the utmost abandonment of reason, to which he assented in serious earnest — and the next moment laughed heartily. * * * I would like, if space admitted, to recount our experiences with opium and hashish. He took hashish many times, and always had a pleasant dream, which seemed to cover many years. He said: ‘I am older than Methuselah. Now I know what De Quincey meant when he said he lived ten, twenty, or sixty years in a dream that lasted only a few minutes, after eating an opium pill. I read his book as we read a romance, but it was reality. This is how Jacob saw heaven above his ladder, and how Saint John, the revelator, got his glimpse of the celestial and infernal regions.” A.L. Rawson, “John Tyndall,” Free Thought Magazine 12/3 (March 1894): 179.

 

9. If we had to look elsewhere for our young American artist, the most likely candidate would be Bayard Taylor (1825-1878). Though primarily a playwright, poet and author of travel books, his artistic abilities were displayed in the illustrations to at least one of his books. He is remembered today, if at all, for his pioneering observations on hashish, which he experimented with in Egypt and the Damascus in 1852. (His stories were one of the incentives that prompted P.B. Randolph to try the drug.) He early on became interested in spiritualism after seeing the Fox Sisters, and claimed to have become a medium himself, experimenting with affinities and magic mirrors. His travels parallel those claimed by H.P.B.: 1844-1846 (Europe); 1848-1849 (California and Mexico); 1851-1852 (Egypt, Nubia, Khartoum, Central Africa, Palestine, Syria (including Baalbek), Malta, Turkey); 1852-1853 (England to Calcutta and China; then, with Perry, to Japan); 1853-55 (lecturing throughout the U.S.); 1855-1857 (Europe, Dalmatia, Constantinople, Central Russia, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Baltic); 1857-1858 (Greece); 1862-1863 (secretary of legation at St. Petersburg, where he met Prince Gortschakoff — on whose orders, H.P.B. later told a reporter, she had come to New York); 1867-1868 (Europe); 1874 (Egypt). He died in December 1878 as U.S. Minister at Berlin. In addition to his own travels, he also chronicled the history of the exploration of Cashmere, Ladak, Little Tibet and Leh by the Schlagentweit brothers and others. The drawback in naming Taylor as the mysterious artist, however, lies in the fact that he nowhere mentions H.P.B. (though his letters were edited by his second wife after his death), and H.P.B. ignores him, with the exception of clipping one of his poems for her scrapbook. On H.P.B.’s remark on Chancellor Gortschakoff, see “On The Banks of Cayuga Lake. Ithaca and its Surroundings,” New York Daily Graphic, Saturday, October 9, 1875, 773. On Taylor’s use of hashish, see, in addition to the references below, Taylor, “Chewing Hasheesh in Egypt,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 6, 1852, 1. On his biography, see Marie Hansen-Taylor and Horace E. Scudder, eds., Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1885), and “Bayard Taylor,” Phrenological Journal 19/2 (February 1879): 81-83.

 

10. Rawson’s hatred of Christianity is apparent in the numerous articles he contributed to the Freethinkers’/Free Thought Magazine all during the 1890s. Like much of that literature, it is shrill and almost childish in its vituperation, rather than thoughtful or reasoned.

 

11. Rawson, “A Theosophical Occult Apology,” 209.

 

12. Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, vol. 5, s.v. Rawson (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1888). The same assertion can be found in the entry on Rawson in the Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans (Boston: Biographical Society, 1904), vol. 9. Both biographical works can now be found online. The entry in Who’s Who in America 1899-1900 (Chicago: A.N. Marquis & Co., 1900) has the pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise but omits the date. To this account of Rawson travelling as a Muslim medical student may be added that of Moses Wolcott Redding, a Masonic traveler of the period, who graced his book with plates of Masonic marks discovered in the Shrine of the Patriarchs at Hebron by Rawson, who “disguised as a Mohammedan student of law (Katib or scribe) visited the ancient mosque at Hebron, and made sketches of the interior of the tombs, also the inscriptions, marks, and devices, which were cut in the wall in the different parts of this building.” Redding, Antiquities of the Orient Unveiled, Containing a Concise Description of the Ruins of King Solomon’s Cities, Together with Those of Forty of the Most Ancient and Renowned Cities of the East, Including Babylon, Nineveh, Damascus, and Shushan. Embellished with Three Beautiful Lithographs, and Seventy Full-Page Engravings (New York: Redding & Co., 1873), 114.

 

13. Almost none of this, of course, is compatible with any of the various scenarios advanced by H.P.B. herself. According to her letter to the Third Section of the Russian Secret police, she was in Baden Baden in 1853. Maria Carlson, “To Spy or Not to Spy: ‘The Letter’ of Mme. Blavatsky to the Third Section,” Theosophical History 5/7 (July 1995): 225-231. Sinnett, while acknowledging the “embarrassments” of his task, has her in Egypt for only three months, over the winter of 1848-1849, then in Europe in 1850, in the Americas in 1851-1852, in India, Java, Singapore and England in 1852-1853, finally in 1853-1855 back in America.

 

A.P. Sinnett, Incident in the Life of Madame Blavatsky, Compiled from Information Supplied by Her Relatives and Friends (London: George Redway, 1886), 59-67. The standard biographical books on H.P.B. have her leaving England for America on the eve of England’s involvement in the Crimean War (March 1854 - February 1856), but the 1883 Rebus sketches of H.P.B.’s life and career, to which her family contributed, have her in London during that time, when, it is said, she caused a candelabrum at a Drury Lane theater to fall on the head of an English lord who accused the Russians of cowardice. H.P.B. was fined five pounds, but paid the magistrate ten, “in case she should happen to meet [the lord] a second time.” D.D. Home, “From Moscow,” Religio Philosophical Journal 36/4 (March 22, 1884): 8. Only the 1853 trip to the United States can be made to agree in any way with Rawson’s story. This trip is perhaps the one mentioned in the interview H.P.B. gave to the New York Mercury in January 1875: “It is said that she visited this country with a party of tourists.” New York Sunday Mercury, January 18, 1875, reprinted in BCW 1:54-55. And the 1853 chronology also fits with a remark by H.P.B. in the Theosophist for July 1883 (p. 258) that until 30 years before (i.e., in 1853), “No one clung more tenaciously, nay more desperately, to the last straw of the hopeful and happy illusion which promises the bliss of eternal personal re-union with all those nearest and dearest that we have lost — than did we. One year in America, during one of our visits to that country, and a terrible personal ordeal, killed that vain hope and settled our knowledge for ever.” It is, of course, futile, as discussed more fully below, to attempt to try and squeeze the events of Rawson’s Cairo-Paris-New York narrative into the 1848-1849 period, even if we ignore the claim of pilgrimages to Mecca, for the compelling reason that Rawson would have turned 19 years old in October 1848, while in 1849, he says, he was “assisting” LaRoy Sunderland in a series of lectures on Mesmerism at the Tremont theater in Boston. Rawson, “John Tyndall,” Freethinkers’ Magazine 12/3 (March 1894): 175-179. Sunderland lectured on “Pathetism” (his amalgam of spiritualism and Mesmerism) in Boston from November 1849 to February 1850. Sunderland, “The First Lecturer,” Spiritual Age 2/11 (March 12, 1859): 2.

 

14. See my article, “Albert Leighton Rawson, Initiate of the Brotherhood of Lebanon, Bigamist and Felon, and D.M. Bennett, ‘FoulMouthed Libertine’ and ‘Apostle of Nastiness,’” to appear in Theosophical History in 2005.

 

15. The details of Rawson’s liaison or marriage with Sarah and his marriage to Mary and subsequent divorce may be found in Mary D. Rawson v. Albert L. Rawson, Supreme Court of the State of New York, Onondaga County, Book of Judgments, vol. 8 (May 31, 1864) (the “Rawson Divorce File”). Titcomb’s affidavit and many of the divorce papers are also printed in Index (October 30, 1879): 523.

 

16. The complaint and the following documents cited are from the Rawson Divorce File.

 

17. Letter from Rawson to Sarah from Pittsford, VT, June 2, 1856, in the Rawson Divorce File.

 

18. Letter from Rawson to Sarah from New York, April 2, 1857, in the Rawson Divorce File.

 

19. Rawson lithograph: Festival at the dedication of Tufts College, Aug. 22, 1855. Boston: J.H. Bufford, c.1855.

 

20. Peter Hastings Falk, ed., Who Was Who in American Art 1564-1975: 400 Years of Artists in America, 3 vols. (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1999), 3:2712. The exhibits were held from May 1st to June 15th of each year. Rawson was not necessarily present while the exhibitions were being held.

 

21. See A.L. Rawson, “A Bygone Bohemia” (Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly 41 (June 1896): 96-107. Anna Ballard, of course, is the journalist who later wrote Col. Olcott that she had interviewed H.P.B. just after her arrival in New York in 1873. Old Diary Leaves, 1:21. Rawson adds to our meager knowledge of Ballard that she was the close friend of the tragic Ada Clare, spending a winter in Cuba with her: “Their bond of union was intellectual and sympathetic, with occasional excursions into occult and unknown worlds, but never as devotees; always as inquirers, truth-seekers. Anna was studious, and under the tuition of the kind-hearted and learned Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall became a reader of Hebrew and other Oriental languages. She has recently returned from a long sojourn in the far East —Ceylon, Burmah, India, etc.— and is happily domiciled in the Garden City, busy sifting gems from her note-book.” (p. 103) Charlie Pfaff opened his Bierstubbe on Broadway near Bleeker in 1855, and Whitman, whom Rawson mentions in his reminiscence, began to attend a couple of years later, which allows us to achieve a closer approximation of the time Rawson was there. It is perhaps of some significance, given Rawson’s claim that H.P.B. used hashish in New York with him and Dr. Smith after she arrived in New York in 1853, that the frequenters of Pfaff’s included Fitz Hugh Ludlow, whose The Hasheesh Eater, Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean appeared in 1857 and whose earlier “The Apocalypse of Hasheesh” had been published anonymously in Putnam’s Monthly in December 1856, and also Bayard Taylor, who had described his experiments with the drug in Damascus and Egypt in 1852 in The Lands of the Saracen, or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain (New York: G.P. Putnam & Co., 1855) and in an article in Putnam’s Monthly in April of the preceding year. In the same period, in 1854, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier published his poem “The Hashish.” In short, at the time H.P.B. was supposed to have arrived in New York, the city was alive with other travelers to the Near East who experimented with hashish, so much so that a few years later the city was notorious for having “Hashish Hells” where the drug might be enjoyed in peace by the privileged and educated classes. See “Secret Dissipation of New York Belles: Interior of a Hasheesh Hell on Fifth Avenue,” Illustrated Police News, December 2, 1876, and H.H. Kane, “A Hashish-House in New York,” Harper’s 67/42 (November 1883): 944-49. The whole topic is excellently explored, with reproduction of the original texts, in “The Fitz Hugh Ludlow Hypertext Library,” online at http://nepenthes.lycaeum.org/Ludlow.

 

22. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia and Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary. Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopædia: A Scientific and Popular Treasury of Useful Knowledge, ed. Frederick A.P. Barnard and Arnold Guyot (Pittsburgh: Alvin J. Johnson & Son, 1878), vol. 3, 1536, adds the fascinating fact that Rawson was “accompanied by his friend and tutor on this trip.” Who might this be? It certainly could not have been the “Professor Webster” of Massachusetts Medical College, with whom Rawson claimed to have studied, since Webster had been hanged in 1850 for murdering his colleague Dr. George Parkman and dismembering the body in his laboratory. Denslow, whose information is derivative from the standard biographical dictionaries, specifies that Rawson’s travel was in the Yucatan (William R. Denslow, 10,000 Famous Freemasons (Trenton, MO: Missouri Lodge of Research, 1960), 4:13-14), as does D.M. Bennett’s biographical sketch which says Rawson at some unspecified time “reached the ancient cities of Palenque and Uxmal in Central America . . . .” D.M. Bennett, The World’s Sages, Infidels, and Thinkers, Being Biographical Sketches of Leading Philosophers, Teachers, Reformers, Innovators, Founders of New Schools of Thought, Eminent Scientists, etc., 2nd ed. revised and enlarged (New York: Truth Seeker Company, [c. 1880]), 979-982.

 

23. In Sinnett’s version, H.P.B. was first in America for about a year from approximately July 1851 to July 1852 during which time she visited New Orleans, Texas and Mexico (Incidents in the Life of Madame Blavatsky, 62-64), and then visited America again for a two-year stay from 1853 to 1855. Sinnett, 66-67.

 

24. In the days of steam travel in the 1880s, the Rev. Henry R. Coleman’s trip, recounted in his Light from the East. Travels and Researches in Bible Lands in Pursuit of More Light in Masonry (1881; Louisville, KY: Author, 1913), took him more than a year (from March 1880 to August 1881), while Rob Morris, another Masonic voyager, did the voyage in a more business-like fashion in six months (between the beginning of February and the end of July 1868), and revels in how much easier the trip had become in the 1860s. See Freemasonry in the Holy Land. Or, Handmarks of Hiram’s Builders: Embracing Notes Made During a Series of Masonic Researches, in 1868, in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Europe, and the Results of Much Correspondence with Freemasons in Those Countries (1872; 10th ed. Chicago: Knight & Leonard, 1876). In the 1840s and 1850s the trip from New York to the Near East alone could take ten weeks. See, e.g., Lieut. W.F. Lynch, U.S.N., Official Report of the Expedition to Explore the Dead Sea and the River Jordan (Baltimore: National Observatory, 1852). Lynch left New York on November 26, 1847, and arrived in Smyrna on February 16, 1848. See also “An American” [Samuel Irenaeus Prime], “Passages of Eastern Travel” in Harper’s in 1856 and 1857,which recounts the travails of his trip through Egypt in 1855-1856.

 

25. Burton left Egypt on the Hajj at the end of May 1853 and returned there in October. See Richard Francis Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1855-1856).

 

26. Rawson’s letter to H.P.B., published in Isis Unveiled, 2:313, relates that his probationary period before initiation by the Druzes was “by special dispensation” reduced to a single month. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia relates that Rawson was “adopted as a brother by the Adwan Bedawins of Moab and initiated by the Druzes in Mount Lebanon,” but the Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary for unknown reasons omits the Druze reference.

 

27. Twelfth Annual Proceedings, 1886, Imperial Council, Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine for the United States of America (New York: Grand Orient, 1886), 82-90. These Annual Proceedings are cited hereafter simply by their number and year.

 

28. Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary. A trip at some point during the period also may be corroborated slightly by the reference of Moses Wolcott Redding to an 1856 map of Palestine (he does not reproduce it) supposedly drawn by Rawson, a map that, if it existed, presumably would have reflected the fruits of Rawson’s travels before that point. Redding, Antiquities of the Orient Unveiled, 357. The earliest map of Palestine by Rawson that he himself ever mentions is one he calls “Lloyd’s Map of the Holy Land,” dated 1866. See Rawson, “An Open Letter to Elizur Wright,” Truth Seeker (November 22, 1879): 749, 752. This has not survived. Lloyd’s was the publisher of many widely distributed maps at the time.

 

29. See Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah and Edward Rice, Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton: The Secret Agent Who Made the Pilgrimage to Mecca, Discovered the Kama Sutra, and Brought the Arabian Nights to the West (New York: Charles Scribners’s Sons, 1990), 178-225. While there were westerners who made the Hajj before Burton, the achievement was certainly notable and in the usual course of events would have made Rawson a celebrity, as it did Burton, if he had in fact made the pilgrimage. Rawson’s claim appears to have been made only considerably after the event, possibly in imitation of Burton’s adventures, and he seems not to have made the boast in the presence of those who might be able to call it into question. Bayard Taylor, for example, whom Rawson says he knew from the days at Pfaff’s, fails to mention Rawson in his litany of the westerners who had made the Hajj. See Taylor, “The Heart of Arabia,” Scribner’s 3/5 (March 1872): 545-557. The most telling indication that Rawson is lying is the fact that in all the innumerable sketches of Biblical life and lands that he published from the late 1860s on he never once included depictions or descriptions of Mecca or Medina —at least ones that I have found— and this despite the fact that such sketches had already been done by others, most notably Burkhardt and D’Ohsson. See Andrew Crichton, History of Arabia, Ancient and Modern, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868), 2:185-87. Rawson seems, however, to have made such claims. See Nadirah Florence Ives Osman, “Alexander Russell Webb, http://www.muslim.org/islam/webb1.htm. Osman says that Rawson “had visited Mecca and Medina, and had been ‘the first American to secure a picture of the tomb of our Prophet’ — at Medina. Osman’s article is from a 1943 speech honoring Alexander Russell Webb, the Theosophist with whom Rawson labored in spreading the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1890s, and the author is quoting from something about Rawson’s sketch, but doesn’t give a source. Rawson’s trip to Mecca, nonetheless, seems to be a pure fiction. A great deal of historical research has been done to identify the visits of western travelers, especially artists (and photographers), to the Holy Land in the nineteenth century since the descriptions and images they transmitted served to create the European and American “Orientalist” perception of the Near East. Rawson’s name, however, nowhere appears, despite the fact that his plates and drawings of the Holy Land graced many travel and Biblical expositions, beginning in 1869. Perhaps he was regarded as a “mere illustrator” rather than as an “artist.” For western artists traveling to the Near East in the period, see the wonderful collection, “Orientalist Art of the Nineteenth Century: European Painters in the Middle East” online at http://www.orientalistart.net. Kalfatovic, who has published a list by year of American travelers to Egypt in the nineteenth century, principally from consular sources, also fails to mention Rawson, but the list is admittedly incomplete. See Martin R. Kalfatovic, “Nile Notes of a Howadji: American Travellers in Egypt, 1837-1903,” Lecture given at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, July 1997. Online at

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/1017/nnpap.htm.

 

30. The machinations of Hubert, which coincided with the appointment of Prince Lucien Murat as Grand Master, are discussed in “Masonry in France,” Masonic Review (Cincinnati)(1853): 217-21. The Calendrier Maçonnique du Grand-Orient lists Hubert as chef du secrétariat for 1851 and 1852, but he also held the position at the beginning of 1853, since he is mentioned in the Bulletin du Grand Orient as such on January 9, 1853. When he was ousted he promptly printed up a circular setting forth the wrongs he had suffered in being deprived of the post. See Transactions of the Grand Lodge of the Most Ancient and Honorable Fraternity Free and Accepted Masons of the State of New York, From August 16, A.L. 5853, to June 11, A., 5854 (New York: Robert Macoy, [1854]), 151 (correspondence received from the Grand Orient).

 

31. Claude, to whose name is added “33e” to indicate his position in the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, is listed as chef in the Calendrier Maçonnique du Grand-Orient for 1853 and 1854 and, while the volumes for the years 1855-1857 are missing from the Robert L. Livingston Masonic Library in New York, the Freemason’s Monthly Magazine (London) in mid-1855 supplies part of the deficit by printing an announcement of the Grand Orient in February 1855 that is signed by “The Grand Chief Secretary of the Order P. Claude.” Claude’s sous-chef was said to be a certain Chiloret.

 

32. The volumes of the Calendrier Maçonnique for 1878-1882 are missing, and the volume for 1883 shows a certain Grimaux in his place. Thévenot is notable in his own right for his (unsuccessful) efforts in the early 1870s to demonstrate that the Grand Orient had never permitted the irregular Rite of Memphis to operate as a recognized rite, and in 1881 for sitting on the board of honor that expelled Leo Taxil (Gabriel Jogand) from Masonry. Rawson must have continued in contact with Thévenot, because the latter is found as head of the Paris temple of the Shrine —a purely fictional affair— in 1888. See Fourteenth Annual Proceedings (1888). “Prince” Rhodocanakis, who figures in Yarker’s correspondence with H.P.B., is said to have headed the Athens temple of the order. On Rhodocanakis, see now Andreas C. Rizopoulos, “The Three Mancunians: Yarker —Lawrence Archer— Rhodocanakis,” Ars Quattor Coronatorum 113 (2000): 166-184. Like Rawson, Rhodocanakis was a confidence man.

 

33. Poore figures in Theosophical history only in that in 1860, as secretary of the United States Agricultural Society, he attested a resolution making Olcott a delegate to a convention in California. See Theosophist 2/4 (January 1880), Supplement, 2. On Poore generally, see Hugh Y. Bernard, “Wheelbarrow and Gridiron: The Colorful Life of Ben. Perley Poore,” Heredom 3 (1894): 7-17, and the entries on him in Appleton’s Cyclopaedia, the Dictionary of American Biography and American National Biography. He was a journalist who became the consummate Washington insider as clerk of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. His Congressional directory was the indispensable book for doing business with the federal government in the period, and he additionally compiled and surveyed all the federal government’s documents since the founding of the country and the documents on the trials of the assassins of Abraham Lincoln, and wrote biographies of various note worthies. He spent the period from 1841-1848 abroad, first as attaché of the U.S. legation in Brussels and then as the agent in Paris of the Massachusetts legislature, gathering material on the American Revolution. During the trip he visited Asia Minor and Egypt, leaving as the record of his travels only the potboiler he wrote on his return: The Mameluke, or, The Sign of the Mystic Tie, a Tale of the Camp and Court of Bonaparte (Boston: F. Gleason, 1852), a tale about a noble Mameluke and a beautiful Jewess.

 

34. A.L Rawson, “Benjamin Perley Poore,” Thirteenth Annual Proceedings (1887). Thévenot, of course, was connected with the Grand Orient, not with the Supreme Council of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, but in France, unlike the situation in the United States and Great Britain, the Grand Orient, at least as a legal matter, incorporated the Scottish Rite under the umbrella of its jurisdiction at the time, and there is nothing improbable in the fact that a person connected with the secrétariat of the Grand Orient might use his connections to have two visiting Americans initiated in the Scottish Rite, especially since Thévenot himself was a member and, beginning with the entry for 1874 in the Calendrier Maçonnique, a “33e.” One possible reading of Rawson’s account is that Poore, at least, entered the Scottish Rite in Paris in 1858 and on the same occasion received the thirty-third degree. This can not be true, and Poore probably received that degree later in Washington from his close friend Albert Pike. Rawson himself was only a thirty-second degree Mason (see “Dr. Wilson Exonerated,” Masonic World 3/9 (February 1886), which quotes an affidavit by Rawson “32° A.A.S.R.”) though he later received the thirty-third degree in Darius Wilson’s spurious Egyptian Rite. See the title page of Rawson’s Egyptian Masonry; An Address Delivered at the Annual Dinner of Oriental Rose Croix Chapter No. 522 at the Elliott House, New Haven, Conn., Jan. 14th, 1886 (New Haven, 1886).

 

35. While Poore in fact became a member of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite in Paris (Bernhard, “Wheelbarrow and Gridiron,” 12), there is no indication of when this took place, and none of his biographical sketches has noted a trip to Europe after 1848. Joseph P. McKerns, of Ohio State University, who wrote his dissertation on Poore, has told me that there is no mention in Poore’s works or letters of such a trip. Poore’s own memoires, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, New York: W.A. Houghton, [1886]) limit themselves to Washington gossip. If Poore in fact was never in Europe after 1848, then Rawson’s entire pronouncement is false. Any effort to push Rawson’s story of initiation into the Scottish Rite back to 1848 or earlier would fall afoul not only of Rawson’s age but also of the fact that Thévenot was not secretary at the time.

 

36. The citations are collected in my Paschal Beverly Randolph: A Nineteenth-Century Black American Spiritualist, Rosicrucian, and Sex Magician (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 261.

 

37. See Johnson’s New Universal Cyclopædia (1878); Appletons’ Cyclopaedia (1888); Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary (1904, but published originally as early as 1897); Bennett, World’s Sages (c. 1880). The obituary of Rawson in American Art Annual 4 (1903): 144, obviously relying on the same sources, again recites the four trips. Denslow’s 10,000 Famous Freemasons, while obviously relying on the above, limits the claim to “several” such trips, as does Rawson’s own Egyptian Masonry, 8.

 

38. Isis Unveiled, 2:312 –313. The claim of lengthy residence in the East is repeated in Redding, Antiquities of the Orient Unveiled, 421, note (“Prof. Rawson has also had the benefit of several years’ residence in Jerusalem and vicinity”) and in the advertising front-papers of Henry Ward Beecher, Life of Jesus, the Christ (New York: J.B. Ford, Edinburgh and London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1871)(“The maps were constructed and the illustrations designed by A.L. Rawson, an artist for years resident in the Holy Land, and thoroughly conversant with its features.”). The same phrase is repeated in the endpapers to H.W. Woodruff’s The Trotting Horse of America; How to Train and Drive Him (New York: J.B. Ford & Co., 1871).

 

39. A phonetic spelling favored by reformers such as Rawson.

 

40. Rawson, “An Open Letter to Elizur Wright,” Truth Seeker (November 22, 1879): 749.

 

41. The Rev. Henry R. Coleman, who met Rawson in New York in March 1880 and used Rawson’s plates of Palestine to illustrate his Masonic travel book (1881), says that Rawson, “the celebrated artist,” “has been three times in the East.” Coleman, Light from the East, 11. Additionally, while the biographical dictionaries dating from 1878-1904 all recite the four trips, as does H.P.B. in 1877, they are certainly wrong and rely on dated material, since Rawson also made a trip to the Near East, a fifth in this hypothesis, over the winter of 1881-1882. See Eighth Annual Proceeding (1882): 54-55, in which James Grant, physician to the Khedive of Egypt, notes in passing that Rawson had been in Egypt the preceding year.

 

42. See Rawson, “An Open Letter to Elizur Wright,” Truth Seeker (November 22, 1879): 749. See also Eighth Annual Proceedings (1882), 54-55; Tenth Annual Proceedings (1884), 49; Fourteenth Annual Proceedings (1888), 54-55. Rawson was back in the United States by January 19, 1875, when he addressed the American Geographical Society.

 

43. The chronology of the period will permit such a visit. Rawson was living in Syracuse, New York, in May 1864, when Mary’s divorce was granted. Rawson Divorce File. Before that, his time is fairly well accounted for by his family in Syracuse, and in addition we have his claim to have traveled “in the Hudson bay territories in 1863” (Appleton’s Cyclopaedia; or in 1861 as he told the New York Times in 1891), to have visited his mother in Vermont through the summer of the same year, and to have been a traveling artist, “with the army East and West,” during the Civil War before settling down in New York in 1866. “Open Letter to Elizur Wright.” At the end of the war, in May 1865, he was in Washington, D.C., where he made his engraving of “Grant’s Army Welcome Home, The Grand Review of Grant’s Army in the District of Columbia on May 23 and 24, 1865.” The period after the war is equally crowded with events. He exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1867, and again in 1869, 1871 and 1879 (see Maria Naylor, ed., The National Academy of Design Exhibits Record 1861-1900, 2 vols. (New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1973), vol. 2 s.v. Rawson), and also found the time to marry yet again, probably in 1865, this time to a Cynthia Curtiss, with whom he had another child. Communication from Rawson’s great-granddaughter Evelyn Mills, April 2003.

 

44. The evidence for this trip in the 1860s really comes from its consequences: the spurt of Rawson’s Near Eastern contributions and drawings (a dozen or so at least) that begin to appear in the late 1860s, as does the 1866 Lloyd’s Map of the Holy Land, mentioned above. See, e.g., Rawson’s The Bible HandBook: For Sunday-Schools and Bible-Readers. With One Hundred Fifty Engravings, and Twenty-Five Maps and Plans, 4th ed. (New York: R.B. Thompson & Co., 1870, copyright, 1869). To this might be added the claim, undoubtedly from Rawson himself, to have “aided Gen. Cesnola greatly in his explorations of Cyprus.” “Theosophy in New York. Facts about Mme. Blavatsky, Her Powers and Her Religion Brilliant Bohemian Gatherings at the Lamasery —Intellectual New Yorkers at the Feet of the Marvellous Russian Countess— The Mediums Outdone —Votaries of the Buddhist Teacher— Is She a Freemason?” New York World (Friday, September 12, 1886), 13. The colorful and eccentric “General” Luigi Palma di Cesnola was the American Consul in Cyprus from December 1865 to 1876, and during his tenure conducted massive excavations on the island, assembling a trove or archaeological treasures which he sold to museums around the world. Given what we know of Rawson’s doings in the 1870s, his aid to Cesnola, if it existed at all, must have been in the late 1860s, but Rawson nowhere appears in di Cesnola’s writings and none of the numerous illustrations in them bears Rawson’s name. See L. Palma di Cesnola, Le ultime scoperte nell’isola di ciprio. Relazione di L. Palma di Cesnola (Torino: Stamperia Reale, 1876) ; General Louis Palma di Cesnola, Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples. A Narrative of Researches and Excavations during Ten Years as American Consul in that Island (London: John Murray, 1877). There may be some truth in the story, however, because an illustration by Rawson of di Cesnola’s excavations, from the December 29, 1899 Harper’s Weekly, is preserved in the art collection of the New York Public Library. A more specific indication of Rawson’s presence in the Near East in the late 1860s is an engraving signed by Rawson and titled “Noureddin Effendi, Governor of Joppa, 1868” that is included in Rob Morris’s Freemasonry in the Holy Land, facing p. 256, and in Coleman, Light from the East, plate xxxxiii, facing p. 528.

Rawson did not accompany Morris on his Masonic pilgrimage, though Morris was in Palestine in 1868, but the sketch permits the conclusion that Rawson was there at that time — an implication lessened, however, by Rawson’s admission (Bible Hand-Book) that some of his sketches of the Holy Land were “improved by photographs,” a boast that leaves the suspicion that some of his sketches were made from photographs rather from life. The engraving of Noureddin Effendi, then, might reflect only one of Morris’s photographs, rather than Rawson’s own original work from life. An example of Rawson’s artistic integrity in this regard is his sketches of H.P.B. in “Theosophical Occult Apology,” which he says were “from life.” In fact, as Col. Olcott realized long ago (Old Diary Leaves, 1:23, n. 1), the sketches were made from photographs H.P.B. had commissioned while in Ithica, New York, in the fall of 1875. Another of Rawson’s skills was the “finishing up” of photographs in color, an ability that H.P.B. was said to share. See Rawson, “The Pictured Rocks of Lake Superior,” Harper’s 34/204 (May 1867), and Hannah M. Wolff, “Madame Blavatsky,” Better Way 9/19 (November 7, 1891): 2.

 

45. If a motive had to be assigned to justify this shifting around of events, it might be found in the attacks launched by D.D. Home against H.P.B. in the late 1870s which accused her of leading an immoral life in Paris in 1858. In this hypothesis, Rawson, by moving to 1853 the encounter with Thévenot that had really occurred in 1858, might have been trying to protect H.P.B. from the errors of her youth — though the motive appears less than compelling since Rawson was writing in 1892, when both H.P.B. and Home were dead.

 

46. These are only a sampling of Rawson’s prevarications, which could be extended at length to include, inter alia, his “degrees D.D. and LL.D. (1880), from Christ college, Oxford, England, and an M.D. from the University of Sorbonne, Paris” (Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary, etc.).