Theosophy and the Society in the Public Eye

Marty Bax – The Netherlands

[This article is based on a talk given on March 7, 2013 one day after the national website on Piet Mondrian was launched. The author had the honor to talk about a recently acquired document from the Mondrian Archive at the Netherlands Institute of Art History: Mondrian’s Horoscope. The article has been slightly edited for style and coherence]

‘Character is Destiny’ - Piet Mondrian and his Horoscope

Recently the Netherlands Institute for Art History acquired the Harry Holtzman Estate on Piet Mondrian. Among the very few documents Mondrian preserved until his death is an interesting one: the horoscope Mondrian had drawn for himself late 1911-early 1912.

Already in 1993-1994 when I was working on the exhibition, “Piet Mondrian 1892-1914, The Amsterdam Years” in the Amsterdam City Archives, now housed in the building designed by Mondrian’s co-theosophist Karel de Bazel, I had several talks with my colleague Robert Welsh about the horoscope. I wondered what insights Mondrian had drawn from it, concerning his personality and his career. Judging from the vast network I uncovered during my investigations, it had become clear that Mondrian was not the stiff, introverted man he has always been judged to be. A better characterization would be: a solitary person among his fellow people, someone who weaved in and out of social circles in a receptive and playful, but at the same time reserved, independent and reflective way. ‘Piet, now you see him, now you don’t’, was the jokey description of him at gallery openings in Paris.

On 7 March 2013, the birthday of Mondrian, the website www.mondriaan.nl was launched. Posthumously Mondrian received an impressive and modern birthday present. Mondrian himself celebrated his birthday on 7 March 1908 by treating himself to a lecture Rudolf Steiner gave in Amsterdam. He kept the Dutch transcription of Steiner’s lectures all his life, together with his horoscope. Apparently they meant much to him.

“I have only one criticism of his [Watkins’s] book: he has a terrible way with hanging modifiers. The Theosophist Annie Besant’s life in measured out in heinous danglers, doggedly modifying the wrong noun (‘Intimate for a time with Annie Besant …, they had drifted apart in his later years’ . . . ”

Theo Tait, reviewing The Undiscovered Country: Journeys among the Dead, by Carl Watkins (Bodley Head) in the London Review of Books, June 6, 2013, p. 20.

Comments on Theosophy by Robert V. Smith in The Way of Oz: A Guide to Wisdom, Heart, and Courage. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2012. Pp. xvii + 259.

“Given Frank and Maud Baum’s belief in theosophy, it’s been suggested that the name Toto [for Dorothy’s dog] may be a contraction of totality — a word that embraces the Eastern philosophical concept if totality, or a natural ‘unity of matter and energy . . . both real and imagined’” (p. 4).

“Frank Baum believed in the tenets of theosophy, which include an acknowledgment of the power of the Buddha’s Golden Road, or path to self-understanding and enlightenment through a life of study and struggle” (p. 17).

[from HPB: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of Helena Blavatsky, Founder of the Modern Theosophical Movement, by Sylvia Cranston and Carey Williams, research assistant, 3rd rev. ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Path Publishing House, 1999; c. 1993), pp. 496-7.]

Jean Sibelius

On the occasion of Sibelius’s ninetieth birthday, the music critic for the New York Times (December 1955) wrote:

“The interrelationship between life and art is one of Sibelius’s chief concerns. Sibelius’s identification with the fields, the woods, the sea and the sky is so profound that it has always permeated his music. . . . As a boy Sibelius wandered in the wilderness of his native province of Hame. Birds always fascinated him. "Millions of years ago, in my previous incarnations," he once told Jalas [his son-in-law], "I must have been related to swans or wild geese, because I can still feel that affinity."”

John Algeo – USA

Chapter 4: The Third Book of the Series: Mary Poppins Opens the Door

Travers, Pamela L. Mary Poppins Opens the Door. San Diego: Harcourt, Odyssey/Harcourt Young Classic, 1997, c. 1943.

Mary Poppins Opens the Door, the third and final volume of the three basic Mary Poppins books (with 255 pages of text), is almost as long as the preceding volume and has eight chapters.

Henry Agard Wallace (October 7, 1888 – November 18, 1965) was the 33rd Vice President of the United States (1941–1945), the Secretary of Agriculture (1933–1940), and the Secretary of Commerce (1945–1946). In the 1948 presidential election, Wallace was the nominee of the Progressive Party.

Henry A. Wallace

Wallace was raised as a Presbyterian and remained a devout Christian all his life. In college, however, he became increasingly dissatisfied with organized religion after reading William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Around 1919 he stopped attending the Presbyterian church and spent the next ten years exploring other religious faiths and traditions, including spiritualism and esoteric religion.

He completed a correspondence course in Theosophy from the People's Temple, and was a card-holding member of the Theosophical Society in America, as verified by the archives in Wheaton, for some years until 1935, when he let his membership lapse after joining Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet, presumably for political reasons. He was also an altar boy in the Liberal Catholic Church.

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From Agatha Christie’s After the Funeral (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 1953), p. 76: “She remade her will about three weeks ago. (It was formerly in favour of the Theosophical Society).”

Agatha Christie