Sublime

A. T. Ariyaratane, a Buddhist elder, who is considered to be the Gandhi of Sri Lanka.

I especially enjoyed the work of Sir John Woodroffe (1865–1936), a.k.a. “Arthur Avalon,” who—while prominently serving as Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court in British India—spent his private hours explaining, defending and ultimately practicing in the then widely reviled Hindu religious schools of Shaiva and Shakta Tantrism.

Five people (Madame Blavatsky, Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, H. Olcott, and A. P. Sinnett) wrote most of what we know to date of the etheric web, auras, magnetism, chakras, spiritualism, psychic perception, and reincarnation. These people took the ancient wisdom of the Hindus and translated them into a language Westerners could understand.

The practical methodologies evolved over many years, and were largely the work of John Hall, a gunsmith from Portland, Maine, and inventor of the “Hall carbine” that became notorious when muckrakers dug into the youthful Pierpont Morgan’s dealings with Civil War procurement authorities.

It became not only a Victorian fad, but also a religious cause. The new religion attracted celebrities like Horace Greeley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Todd Lincoln, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and even Sir Arthur ConanDoyle, the British creator of the supremely logical character, Sherlock Holmes. There were eight million Spiritualists in the United

The white man behind it was Elihu Embree, an iron manufacturer and former slave owner who had evolved, at age thirty, into an abolitionist. Elihu mailed his newspapers to Southern politicians, intent on persuading them to end the horrors of slavery.