Emma the Infidel: 1878

After arriving in Australia in 1878, Emma did a stint in Sydney before traveling south for a long (and apparently very successful) winter season in Melbourne in the Harbinger of Light circle. She made her way back from Melbourne to Sydney in September, with stops in Bendigo, Albury and elsewhere -- all of which are reported by the meticulous Australian press and their system of distributed corrrespondents. Arriving back in Sydney in late September, Emma did a few lectures on the auspices of the Progressive Lyceum Society before launching into her now-tried-and-true "popular science" series of lectures: magic, witchcraft, sorcery, etc.

Her local competitors are around. Thomas Walker has swapped cities with her, and gone to Melbourne; Lotti Wilmot is in the neighborhood, as are her shadows/debunkers Hamilton and company, and an ex-Catholic priest named Chiniquy, charging the ramparts of Rome and giving lectures "for ladies only" on obscure Roman Catholic ritual, who I have to look into but who is tied in some way or other to Madame Wilmot. But what's interesting about this second round of lectures in Sydney, in the spring of 1878, is the wrath Emma brings down on herself from a clergyman named Wazir Beg.

Not the first time Emma's heterodoxy has been called out, but certainly one of the most frank attacks on her beliefs. Definitely something we're going to have to dig out of the dustbin of history.

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Hoped this was a pamphlet, but alas -- it appears to be a lecture, targeting Emma as well as influential Australian spiritualists, that Beg delivered on (at least) Sunday 27 October 1878 at Chalmer's Church in Alfred Park, while Emma was across town at the Theatre Royale in Castlereagh Street, given an audience-driven trance lecture.