W. E. Coleman, J. J. Morse, and EHB

One of the interesting things about chasing Emma has been the development, on my part, of a certain protective attitude about Emma. I can call her veracity or motives into question if I like, but others cannot....and I see slights against her where perhaps there are none.

With that said, I've taken a detour into the life and work of James Johnson Morse, a younger contemporary and colleague of EHB's, who will take over the editorship of The Two Worlds in the early part of the twentieth century. J. J. Morse is perhaps more neglected than EHB -- it's difficult to find most of his primary works in print or online, his addresses have not been collected, and no one's bothered, as of yet, to put together even a basic chronology of his life. Two of his works -- Leaves from My Life and Practical Occultism -- have made it into the ever-loving maw of Google Books (thankfully), and this snippet, from William Emmette Coleman's introduction to Practical Occultism, seems to me aimed directly at EHB:

One of the more conspicuous of these perversions -- especially during the last decade (the 1880s) -- has been the growing tendency, on the part of a portion of the adherents of the Spiritual Philosophy, to introduce into that philosophy sundry elements pertaining to the mysticism of ancient and modern times. Certain of the inspirational speakers, and others among the public workers for Spiritualism, together with many of its followers in the private walks of life, have been misled, to a greater or less degree, by the current idealisms, transcendentalisms, and fanciful conceits, born of crude speculations and nurtured by spurious philosophies and pseudo-science. Sound philosophy and genuine science, while in accord with the demonstrated truths of Modern Spiritualism, have neither lot nor part in any of the mutually-antagonistic and ever-conflicting forms of mysticism with which the world has been and still is cursed; including all those phases thereof with which many have sought to encumber Spiritualism. A rational, natural, healthy, progressive, scientific Spiritualism, at one with the spirit of the age, with the trend of the most advanced modern thought, must be wholly free from the degrading and soul-stultifying theses and dogmas of the mysticisms of the day; and until everything of the latter character be eliminated from the spiritual movement, it can never hope to obtain that respect and confidence of the intelligent, thoughtful men and women of our planet to which it will be justly entitled when its complete dissociation from its present perverting encumbrances becomes an accomplished fact.

As I have said before, the 1870s and 1880s are not only the boundary marker for the Occult Renaissance, but are also the decades in which Modern Spiritualism begins its (inevitable) institutitionalization, and the beginning of the "commercialization of the occult" that produced, ultimately, the New Age movement and the supermarket-of-the-spiritual that we find on the shelves of Barnes and Noble today.

Coleman's critique ought to be seen in that context,as of that moment; indeed, he demands it.

More as a note to one's self than anything else -- in the multi-party pitched battle between the scientific establishment, the guardians of cultural norms, the representatives of orthodox religion, Modern Spiritualist, and Theosophy -- who chose the wiser transformational strategy: EHB or HPB? Blavatsky's decision to break from the trappings, methods and difficulties (practical and otherwise) of Modern Spiritualism, EHB's decision to underpin the modern Awakening with (idiosyncratically selected) elements of the western Occult tradition - which strategy was more productive? The answer is, unfortunately, plain. Emma's choices forced her, increasingly, into a narrow tributary of the modern occult, and her work lives on today -- and palely, at that -- only in partial form: in her founder's status among contemporary Spiritualists, in her "historical" works (I am always amused by the uncritical way in which her work is used by orthodox historians as, itself, history rather than propaganda) and in the Church of Light. She escaped, for sure, the sort of silence in which J. J. Morse is enveloped today. But that is not much of a victory.