John Abraham Heraud

Section VIII of Art Magic, the "Man the Microcosm of the Universe" section, is a particularly interesting part of that text, in my view. It is rife with traces of Emma -- long cribbed quotations (from Hargrave Jennings) strung together scissors-and-paste fashion, barely concealed borrowings from Eliphas Levi (the "attraction is not a force" theme, among other bits), scientific terminology borrowed and redeployed somewhat awkwardly, polemic addresses directly to the reader. And, intermingled, some not-so-Emma features, including: comma splices.

I was struck -- I don't know why -- by the phrase "ancient Theosophists," used just after the longish Hargrave Jennings borrowing, and decided to look to see how frequently that phrase occurred in the document base for the first half of the nineteenth century, in English.

Prior to 1870, the phrase "ancient Theosophists" isn't used much in printed material, if the Google Books sample is at all representative.

The texts in which the phrase is used are instructive, and include (among a half-dozen texts):

• "Alchemy, by an Alchemist", in Fraser's Magazine for 1839
• "Sketches of Theosophy and Freemasonry" in The Monthly Magazine for 1840.
• J. C. Colquhoun's An History of Magic, Witchcraft and Animal Magnetism, and Robert Mackay's The Progress of the Intellect, as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews, both from 1851

What's curiously suggestive about the periodical pieces, in addition to their thematic affinities for the material in Art Magic is that they are likely both the product of John Abraham Heraud, a literary jobber connected with Emma in a number of diaphanous ways. Heraud was the editor of The Monthly Magazine at the time the article on Freemasonry and Theosophy was published, having been the editor of Fraser's from 1831-33, and a contributor (signed and unsigned) thereafter -- including a longish piece on Paracelsus in 1835.

Heraud was an auto-didact; a mystical poet ("a worshipper of the vast, the remote and the terrible") who wrote among other things a verse drama linking (as texts associated with Emma would do) meso-american culture with Thebes; a drama critic associated with the Haymarket and Adelphi in any number of ways; a playwright involved in the breaking of the theatre patents.

Heraud wrote on Swedenborg, Boehme, Agrippa -- the range of reference of the author of Art Magic, really.

He was an intimate of Phelps, Wallack, Webster, Blanchard and others who touched Emma's life as an actress directly -- Heraud may well have been in the audience when Emma debuted at Sadler's Wells.

And Heraud was an accomplished mesmerist and friend of Martineau, Braid, Elliotson and Dupotet, who conducted his own mesmeric experiments, including the control of young female lucides.

I could play pile-on at this point, with gusto. Can you say "friend (and neighbor) of James Pierrepont Greaves", "friend of Francis Foster Barham, progenitor of the Al religion"? Really, deeply enmeshed in the whole Aesthetic Institution milieu -- that peculiar mix of reformism and occultism characteristic of....oh, I don't know... Emma Hardinge Britten.

A short biographical sketch, by his daughter, exists, but it is more her life than his.