Pipgen, Part Two

Have a look at the cover of the 1897 edition of Ghost Land: the so-called "Progressive Thinker" edition.

Based on what we've learned about the significance of the pigpen cipher on the cover of the first edition of Ghost Land, it is interesting to note that the cipher on the cover of the second edition is different.

For the curious -- the cipher is a corruption, not a new, different, Freemasonic mnemonic. It reads HQWSSQKS -- the symbol for T having been reproduced incorrectly as the symbol for Q on the 1897 cover.

This sheds more light on the bibliographical issues associated with the 1897 edition, which I've written about already. I'd say that this garble on the cover of the 1897 version can mean only one of two things: either (a) Emma was only peripherally involved in the production of the 1897 edition (as the licensee of the text, with no editorial oversight, or perhaps not even involved) or (b) the significance of the cipher was lost on Emma, and therefore the corruption went undetected in her pre-print review of the book.

And From Masonry, A Return To The Orphic Circle

Two bits of evidence for the Circle, and its members: a snippet from Hockley's testimony before the Dialectical Society Commission, clearly linking Hockley, Richard Francis Burton and Philip Henry Stanhope in a skrying circle, and Bulwer Lytton's memorandum on the practice of geomancy.

I am struck by Hockley's matter-of-fact tone in his testimony, and struck more strongly by the extent to which Bulwer Lytton's memorandum gives the lie to his testimony before that committee -- which was, in essence, that he was a scientist, investigating but reserving judgment. This memorandum is clearly that of an experienced practitioner.

Emma Hardinge Britten, Royal Arch Mason

A reader goaded me into this, and I don't know quite what -- if anything -- it actually means. And for all I know, I may be the last person on the planet to have cotton'd on to it.

Folks may have noticed that the front covesr of both the US and UK first editions of Ghost Land feature the image of a rosy cross, and an encrypted text string.

The cipher used on the cover is a pigpen cipher, so named for its superficial similarity to the layout of pigpens as seen from above.

There are various versions of the pigpen cipher, some secular and some used by the Masons, and it was quite a popular cipher, apparently, during the Civil War.

There are several versions of this cipher associated with various branches of Masonry: a York Rite version, a version for teaching boards used in mainstream Masonry, and corrupted versions used as demonstrations and often labeled "freemasons' cipher". The variation has to do, for the most part, with the order of use of the structuring element (the crosshatches).

For example, here is the third degree talking board version:

And here is another version, associated with Royal Arch Masonry:

When you use the third degree talking board variant, the code on the cover of Ghost Land decodes to HPWOOPTO.

When you use the variant of the pigpen cipher favored by Royal Arch Masons, the sequence decodes to HTWSSTKS.

It was (and perhaps is) common, in the training of Masons of all stripes, to teach initiates key portions of the ritual and liturgy by means of mnemonics, which were frequently the initial letters of a phrase or sentence. People who've read a bit in Masonic literature will recognize this (somewhat annoying, for the lay reader) feature of Masonic texts. HPWOOPTO stands for...nothing at all that I've been able to locate. But HTWSSTKS stands for "Hiram, Tyrian, Widow's Son, Sendeth To King Solomon." It appears on Masonic ephemera associated with Royal Arch (RAC) Masonry, and is associated with what I understand is a coveted degree, that of the Mark Master Mason, a degree in Royal Arch Masonry, which is itself generally held to be the highest order of "traditional" Masonry.

So, was Emma a Freemason? Or was the author of Ghost Land -- that is, someone other than Emma -- a Freemason?

I'll leave aside the loaded question -- was Emma the author of Ghost Land? -- for the moment (though that moment is being forced to its crisis, as Eliot said in a different context), and just remark that the Mark Master Mason degree's ritual is characterized, as I understand it, by the Mason earning his or her right to a personal, identifying mark: to authorship, as it were. Ironic, then, that a sign clearly intended to indicate that the author is a Mark Master Mason would be put on the front cover of a text published anonymously.

Instead, I'll remark that there is evidence of the admission of women into Masonic Lodges dating back -- in Ireland at least -- to the 1700s, even though the standard practice was and is to shunt women off into parallel orders -- sort of a "little sister program" like that practiced by many college fraternities.

And I'll point out that, even if we accept Emma's story of the genesis of Ghost Land as hand-on-heart sworn testimony, that story still places the design of the published form of the "remains" out of which she made Ghost Land solely in the hands of its "editor": Emma herself.

And I'll close with this extended snippet, which I think sums up nicely what we might be dealing with here, noting that the date of the event in question is June of 1864, during Emma's first trip to California:

As the text indicates, the piece was originally published in the Banner of Light -- this particular recapitulation is from the Freemasons’ Magazine and Masonic Mirror of 4 March 1871, p. 168.

Emma Hardinge Britten, Mark Master Mason...

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No, wait, let's pile on a bit. It's such fun. Compare to Modern American Spiritualism (p. 413): “Besides these interesting personages, Dr. Ferguson makes high and eulogistic mention of a lady well known in Memphis, Tennessee, Mrs. Winchester by name, a person of the highest social position, wealth, and standing, and, amongst other remarkable endowments, gifted with the power to give masonic signs, and go through all the degrees of masonry, in the presence of the most accomplished of the order, whose testimony to her ʻsupernatural knowledge of their craftʼ has often been rendered with generous candor.” Or p. 354: “Thus, at one of the circles, the spirit of a Mr. Owens, formerly the proprietor of a masonic hall, gave to some masons present, through an uninstructed woman, unmistakable masonic signs.” Or p. 558: “At another time a company of ladies, with one gentleman, from New York, called to witness this phase of manifestations. A line of characters appeared upon the arm of Mary (Comstock), which none of us could decipher, until the gentleman was asked if he could tell. He replied he could; that it was the name of a masonic brother who died twenty years before, given in the masonic alphabet.”

And, just for comparative purposes, you might have a look at the references to Masonry in Art Magic, whose author is uniformly dismissive of modern Masonry, comparing "ancient masonry, both speculative and operative" with "its degraded and imbecile descendant, modern masonry" (p.68).

Is it really likely that the author of Art Magic could hold such an opinion, and then, in his next text, advertise his standing in the "degraded and imbecile descendent" in such a (to Masons, obvious, I assume) fashion?

A Mahatma, At Home

This, from Weatherly and Maskelyne's The Supernatural? (c. 1891):

(Larger, high-resolution image here)

One of the things I have yet to do is assemble a representative sample of "spiritualist and occultist cartoons" from the mainstream media between 1850 and the first world war. The fluency and range of reference of these cartoons, after all, tells us a great deal more about the extent to which spiritualist or occultist tropes penetrated the mainstream culture that the movement(s) both depended upon and opposed than, say, a review of the single-subject literature on either side of the "spiritualist question" would.

I'm not sure we could call The Supernatural? mainstream, though. Lionel Weatherly was a sanitorium and private mental asylum keeper, who published a great deal on the management of the clinically insane, and his portions of The Supernatural? are predictably mechanistic: that which passes for the supernatural is, under it all, delusion and sensory deception. Maskelyne's contributions to the text, which appear to be welded in, consist of a rather banal set of essays on Oriental Jugglery (people misunderstood it), Spiritualism (all mediums debunked, no genuine phenomenon) and Theosophy (Blavatsky a blatant fraud, and the conversion of Annie Besant inexplicable).

Judging from Weatherly's introduction, he and Maskelyne (father and son) were chums and collaborators, and Weatherly was certainly trading in Maskelyne's reputation as a debunker, as he freely admits in his introduction:

Who is there, in this England of ours -- who is there, I may say, at all known to men, who has the right, from practical experience, to speak with such authority on Magic, on Spiritualism, or on the so-called Miracles of Theosophy, as Mr. Maskelyne? Who was it exposed the Davenport Brothers? Who was it who threw many a bombshell into the Spiritualism Camp? Who was it who fearlessly cautions those at the bottom of these latter-day miracles, abd bids them Beware?

The 'spirit photograph' that forms part of the front matter for the book gives us a good view of the two men, as well as an interesting example of a deliberately faked 'spirit photograph'.

The Mahatma illustration, which I think is quite humorous, and is rich in allusions suggesting that the details of the Coulombs' revelations were common knowledge among readers likely to purchase an Arrowsmith's three-and-sixpence train station stall book. The illustration is I believe by one T. C. Nunn.