(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 22nd. (19)
In 1858, he exhibited
his work for the first time at the National Academy of Design at its then-new
Building on 10th 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 13th — 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.
 |
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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.).
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