Sybilla: Yet Another EHB Novella

In the pages of The Two Worlds for 1891, we find yet another otherwise unpublished EHB novella: Sybilla; The True and Thrilling Autobiography of "One Alone". EHB's known fictional output is probably now at parity with, if not larger than, her non-fiction output (particularly if we're not permitted to claim Art Magic or Ghost Land as belonging to EHB), which is in and of itself interesting.

The first paragraph is promising, given what we know about Emma's tendency to transmute life into art in her fiction:

I was always "one alone." I don't know at what early age I first began to think, in fact, according to our present ideas of reflection, I don't know that I ever thought at all until I was seven years of age. Then it was that a change occurred in my little life, which I now believe awakened thought within me. Prior to that scarcely mature age I seemed to live a kind of strange double life -- too difficult for me to comprehend or think about. One life was passed partly in a fair-sized roomy attic, which my motber rented, and where she kept house - she and I together - cooked, and eat (sic) our humble meals, and slept, and partly in a National or public sohool for very young children, amongst whom I passed several hours of each day, except Sunday. I dearly loved Sunday, because on that day I was free from school - free to spend it with my ever dear, dear precious mother, w hom I so tenderly loved that I think now she was my sole idea of all existence outside myself - that is, in this my first life. This beloved mother of mine was a ballet dancer at one of tbe great metropolitan theatres. She had to leave me then very often; nearly every morning, in fact, to go to what she called rehearsals; and always of an evening, some time long after I bad been put to bed. I never slept though, until she was gone, because I so dearly loved to watch her as she moved about the garret, or sat working and humming sweet low pathetic airs. I hardly knew, at that time, what a "Ballet Dancer" was - I knew it must be something very fine and bea.utiful, first, because my beautiful mother was one; and next, because she began to prepare me for the same charming profession. How I enjoyed the lessons she gave me no words can express. I could not only do all the steps, attitudes, pirouettes, and figures she put me through, but it seemed to me often that I could have sprung higher, bounded more lightly and swiftly than her lessons permitted. Oh, they were glorious! and when I was told that some day I, too, should be a "Ballet Dancer" like my mother, I was almost, frantic with delight, and only lived in anticipation of when that happy time should arrive.

The device of a child -- the child of a ballet dancer -- is, if I can be allowed the gross pun, pregnant with possibility.

Emma on Reincarnation, 1875

Emma's first significant published statement on the evils of the doctrine of reincarnation, published in The Spiritual Scientist on 20 and 27 May of 1875, at a time when the journal was materially dependent on the favor of Olcott & Company, is worth reading in its own right, and a pretty crisp indication of where the leading lights of the Occult Renaissance were, collectively, in their thinking at that time. I doubt this piece would have seen print in The Spiritual Scientist if HSO had objected to it.

Emma and the Tommy Knockers

Paul Gaunt has published, in the December issue of Psypioneer (available from the archive site soon I expect), Emma's article from the Banner of Light for 9 October, 1875, in which she claims to have seen kobolds -- red, black and metallic -- in "the mines in Germany and the Bohemar Wold", noting (appropriately) in his introduction that we have not one shred of evidence that Emma ever visited Germany.

Marie Countess of Caithness also reproduces this piece in Chapter 19 of her Old Truths in a New Light.

Personally, I think Emma cribbed this story either from Philip Henry Stanhope or Sir Charles Wyke, and salted it down (as it were) with her own experiences in English and California mines -- aside from the darkness of the late 1830s, Emma's chronology up to 1874 is sufficiently packed that a trip to the Continent is unlikely.

What's interesting to me is that place name -- Bohemar Wold. It appears nowhere in Google's indices other than Caithness's reproduction of Emma's letter. Wold is of course a field or plain, but Bohemar is a Czech word, and I think Emma meant "Bohemar Wald", the mountain range that separated the states of Bavaria and Bohemia at the time. That she got it wrong -- a quick trip to the gazetteer would have sufficed for fact-checking -- is important, I think. There were indeed plenty of mines of nearly every sort -- salt, coal, precious metals -- in that range. But -- as is so often the case -- any literate newspaper reader of the time would have known that.

That elementary spirits were an important part of Emma's world-view in 1875 should come as no surprise to any reader of Art Magic.

7 January 1875: A Fossil, Played Out, Angry

From the 7 January 1875 issue of The Spiritual Scientist, which I am cleaning up for publication. The context will be clear soon enough; right now, reading this letter as a pure verbal icon leads one -- or me, anyway -- to all sorts of speculations and connection-making, particularly given what we think we know about Emma's own, early brush with "free love"...I mean, "social freedom".

To the editor of the Spiritual Scientist:
Permit me to congratulate you on the spirit of fairness and candor that prompts you to admit the communications of "Diogenes" to a place in your columns. I do not felicitate either you, myself or the cause of Spiritualism, in the characteristic (sic) of mediumship described by the said "Diogenes," but I do rejoice that at least one journal, whose editor is an avowed Spiritualist, has proved himself possessed of honesty, courage and candor enough to give publicity to that which is not Spiritualism, but a miserable attempt to imitate it for the sake of establishing a remunerative calling. Up to the time when I denounced "social freedom" as an abominable fungus, fastened without cause or warranty (suc) on the pure soil of Soiritualism, I was "a noble worker," "a glorious sister," "an apostle," "a chosen vessel." "a shining light", &c., among Spiritualists; but when I began to write and preach in denunciatory terms of the attempts of sensualism to fasten its loathsome hobby on to the great car of Spiritualism, I became a "fogy", "fossil, played out," &c., I "knew nothing of what was transpiring in the great moving world," where "social freedom" delights to disport itself. In this last assertion my antagonists were profoundly mistaken. I, like your correspondent "Diogenes," for purposes of my own (and purposes belonging to higher intelligences than myself) have kept careful and unceasing watch and ward over the progress and conduct of the movement called "Spiritual," and hence I am far better prepared that my said antagonists deem me to analyze and eventually to expose, firmly and unswervingly, the characteristics of the foul weeds which have overgrown the rare crop of spiritual blossoms we once enjoyed, but now, alas! so seldom even realize a glimpse of. Permit me to inform your friend "Diogenes" that the experiences which he so graphically details in xonnwxtion with Mrs. S. W. Fletcher and Mrs. E. J. Wells have been mine with about two score of "celebrated" advertising mediums, whom, from time to time, I have myself visited in Boston, and who have not even had wit or intuition enough to guess at the character of their visitor. I have not called on these persons to "detect them in fraud," to "catch them out," or to fortify my own feelings of deep disgust at the cloud of folly and imposture that has overspread the once holy communion of spirits, with additional evidences of popular deterioration. I have made visits to the various public mediums of Boston and elsewhere, in the longing, yearning desire to see the true, glorious evidences of spiritual telegraphy, which I have so often enjoyed in the past, again or still at work. "Diogenes" has given, almost verbatim, in his last two communications, the substance of the stuff for which I have now paid upwards of fifty dollars, but which I never mean shall cost me or any friends I can influence one cent more.

Compare the magnificnat results produced at the dark circles of old Jonathan Koons, as described in my own history of Modern American Spiritualism, with the equivocal sgallow farces enacted in so-called dark circles in 1874 -- circles first endorsed as "transcending all previous marvels," and then denounced as bare-faced imposture. Compare the trials and tests applied tothe poor Foxes, at Rochester, and the flimsy talk of "little Indian girls" and "big braves" measured out at a dollar and a half today, and the most rabid Spiritualisms among us would come to the conclusion that either the spirits or the mediums have fallen from grace, and that the more flourishing the trade, the more it savors of the earth earthy (sic) and the less of the pretended source in the spirit world. When our spiritual writers will exercise as much charity for the victims of wrong doings and imposture as they claim for the wrong-doers and imposters themselves, -- when mediums will let the spirits do the work instead of trying to help or supercede them, -- when animalists (italics orginal) will hold meetings, and form societies, and act, preach and practice as such, and not steal the name and fame of Spiritualists to work under, the glorious days of the communion will return.

Spirits have not left us, nor has the mediumistic force failed. But good spirits cannot control bad men and women; will not lend their aid to sanction imposture, or endorse licentiousness; and bad spirits are only too glad to act out over and over again bad and impure lives with association with their kind on earth.

Such to my mind is the rationale (italics original) of the present flood of folly, imposture and infamy that is casting its ill odor over the fragrant garden of spiritual truth and purity.

Yours for the better time past, and the hope of the good time to come,

EMMA HARDINGE BRITTEN

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Reading further into the year's issues, EHB becomes involved in a back-and-forth with another correspondent, focusing on the question of whether or not EHB has, in effect, libeled "Boston mediums" in this letter (clearly, she has not). Her adversary -- don't want to spoil readers' fun -- notes, as I noted, the odd digression of this letter into "social freedom" (which EHB subsequently rephrases somewhat cleverly as 'free lust'), and does an effective job of puncturing EHB's rhetorical envelope, demanding that she pony up details on the fraudulent mediums she'd visited -- pretty compelling evidence that EHB's posturing was no more effective then, than it is now.

This tempest in a column-inch helps, I think, to contextualize some of the anti-spiritualist rants in Art Magic and certainly makes her contra-dark-seance position circa 1880 much richer and deeper.

Still not sure I understand the "animalist" label, but that's something to look into, for sure...

Manchester, December 5th, 1897

From the introductory matter to Thomas Olman Todd's Hydesville: The Story of the Rochester Knockings, Which Proclaimed the Advent of Modern Spiritualism (1905) (available here):

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Manchester, December 5, 1897
Mr. T. O. Todd

Dear Sir,

Having been a sad invalid since June of this year, and still suffering, I do not quite remember whether I have or not written to you on the subject to which I desire to devote this poor scrawl. If I have not done so hitherto -- permit me to say, -- altho' I have been obliged from severe illness to suspend my platform work and writings, I am as much interested in the earnest desire to help the progress of Spiritualism as I have been in my long years of past devotion to that cause.

In consequence of my sad illness I have been obliged to refuse my kind American Friends' urgent invitation to attend their Grand Celebration at Rochester, N.Y., next June.

* * * * *

I am most anxious to do something for our noble cause, [and] [enquirers] will necessarily want to have some special accounts of the first opening of the Spiritual Movement and the history of the poor Fox Family and their immediate connection with the famous "Rochester Knockings." All this I, who knew the Fox Family and all the circumstances of the case personally and intimately, have written and published in full detail in my widely circulated work "Modern American Spiritualism."--But this work consists of 560 pages, and tho' bought by thousands of American Spiritualists, I should not know in England where to turn to find a copy except in my own bookcase.

Now what I propose is this: In the first hundred pages is the full and entire history of the movement; the life and labours of A. J. Davis,--the life, sufferings, and bitter persecutions of the poor Foxes, and all their early trials; friends, foes, and all connected with them. Why cannot you . . . take those hundred pages, condense them, and make a splendid pamphlet of them?

* * * * *

Sincerely yours, EMMA HARDINGE BRITTEN.

---

Todd's work is of course an attempt to do just that.

But if this is not the terminal sadness of the forgotten pioneer, urging a return to the material she finds so formative, and more importantly urging a different way, an approach that does not recapitulate her errors, that does not leave the truth, as it were, stranded in a backwater .... what is it? Yes, EHB is as self-promoting here as ever. Yes, her "sacrifice for the cause" and "present at the events recorded" flags are positively dirty from the number of times she's wrapped herself in them.

But, even so, is this not the voice of the adherent, the true believer?

William the Cipher - Common Carrier?

I've been heads down now, for what seems like ages but is less than a month, getting periodicals ready for the launch of the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals website...

Pat's given me a peek at some letter books associated with the RPJ, in which William-the-Cipher Britten features prominently, and that's caused me to detour a bit back into the darkness of William's life: a darkness we're not likely to lighten much, no matter how hard we try. If I'm right that the apocryphal story of William, rescuing Cora Hatch from destitution in Connecticut in 1858 or so is based in fact, and that William was more or less continuously in the US from that time until after his marriage to Emma, we'd have to ask: what was he doing during that time, given that he has no particular skills in evidence during his marriage to Emma, other than a knack for galvanic medicine (explained by a stint in the midwest getting his Vitapathic Doctor degree) and the ability to manage his wife's career?

The slimmest of hints, this morning, courtesy of the relentless scrounging of Google Alerts, from the Annual Report of the Quartermaster-General of the State of New Jersey for the Year 1861:

William Britten, common carrier, selling his services to the state of New Jersey in 1861, to move four divisions of volunteer soldiery around?

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Someone asked: what apocryphal story about William and Cora Hatch? Answer: this one. Open the page, and search for "Britten" - the last reference (to a section of an introduction to Cora's collected works) suggests pretty clearly that William rescued Cora from B.F. Hatch -- directly or indirectly -- in a New Haven, Connecticut hotel in what must have been 1857 or 1858.