A Trout In The Milk: Plotting The Orphic Circle

Emma's claim to have been a clairvoyante for a collection of occult practitioners -- including, according to Emma, Richard Morrison (Zadkiel), Philip Henry Stanhope and Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- is the most vexed question in a biographical trajectory that is full of vexed questions.

This "Orphic Circle" left no records that anyone is aware of -- we cannot know with certainty or high probability whether Emma is telling the truth about this period in her life. But, for her assertions to be plausible, we would need to be able to establish as a matter of historical fact at least the following:

1. that Morrison, Stanhope and Bulwer-Lytton (as well as other 'occult figures' possibly implicated in Emma's life, including Dickens, Disraeli and Richard Francis Burton) all knew one another at more that a reputational level -- that a real social network existed among these figures
2. that some or all of these figures were actually involved in a 'circle' -- that is to say, an organized set of activities -- somehow implicating or involving occult subjects
3. that clairvoyante subjects were used in these organized activities

The first prerequiste -- the existence of a real social network that was more than reputational -- has I believe been met. In a social network with John Varley the painter and occultist and Lady Blessington of Gore House circle fame, we can link all the relevant figures to one another, in intimate social discourse involving (among other things) the casting of horoscopes and the earnest discussion of occult topics. In some cases -- as with Bulwer Lytton and Burton, for example -- Varley actually tutored possible Orphic Circle members.

I also believe that the second prerequisite -- the documented existence of an organized occult investigative group -- has been met, at least prima facie: Varley, Morrison, and Robert Cross Smith (Raphael) were members of a practicing geomancy circle called the Mercurii (Bulwer-Lytton's geomantic casting for Disraeli exists to this day) that operated at least up to Smith's death in 1832.

And I believe now -- thanks once again to Google's relentless drive to restore the obscure -- we have evidence that young female clairvoyantes were used by Orphic Circle members.

This snippet, from The Astrologer and Oracle of Destiny for February 15, 1845, is squarely in the period of our investigation, and links Morrison to clairvoyante usage unequivocally.

All circumstantial, to be sure, and none of it directly pointing to our Emma.

But as Thoreau said, some circumstantial evidence is very strong, and this collection is beginning to bear a resemblance to a trout in the milk.

And in any case the snippet is noteworthy for exposing the interaction between the occult control (Zadkiel, in this case) and the clairvoyante -- and the "astronomy" revealed bears to my mind at least some interesting similarities to the "astronomy" in Ghost Land.

One interesting note: several folks, myself included, are inclined to link Richard Francis Burton to the Orphic Circle. Emma named (dead) Orphic names in the late 1880s -- Burton died in 1890. If Burton was a member of the circle during the period of Emma's involvement, we can date that involvement very precisely to the fall of 1840 through mid-1842, simply because that was the only period during which Burton could have been involved: during his brief stint at Trinity College, Oxford, before his expulsion, the purchase of his commission, and his voyage to India to join his regiment.