Rise of Women As Spiritual Leaders 1870-1970

(July 6, 2022) The transcendental superiority of the spirit realm was put into practice with the spiritual healing of Christian Science. This both shows the effectiveness of magical placebo healing and its limitations.

Mary Baker Eddy was born July 16, 1821 as Mary Baker in New Hampshire and died December 3, 1910 in Newton Massachusetts. She founded The Church of Christ, Scientist, in New England in 1879. She also founded The Christian Science Monitor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning secular newspaper in 1908 whose mandate was fair news reporting in contrast to the biased sensationalism of the day. She wrote numerous books and articles with the most popular being Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures which had sold over nine million copies as of 2001.

In her book she identified the deep reality of nature as "Principle" which seems to be her word for the Greek concept of Logos, the conscious interconnection of all things. She also uses the word "metaphysics" instead of theology because she is arguing from nature and not the Bible. She is also a dualist in that Principle is good and matter is evil. She says this on the first page of her book:

But being the dualist she does not make the mind (consciousness) equal to matter but insists it is superior and that will eventually cause her movement to fail because it encourages ignoring the findings of medical science.

Mary Baker married Dentist Daniel Patterson in 1853 after the death of her first husband. On October 14, 1861, Daniel wrote to mesmerist Phineas Parkhurst Quimby asking if he could cure his wife Mary of some undisclosed illness. Quimby replied that he had too much work in Portland, Maine to leave but if Patterson brought his wife to him he would treat her. Before going they first tried the nearby water cure at Dr. Vail's Hydropathic Institute but her health deteriorated even further. A year later, in October 1862, Mary and Daniel visited Quimby where she improved and publicly declared that she had been able to walk up 182 steps to the dome of city hall after a week of treatment. The cures were temporary, however, and Eddy suffered relapses.

Despite the temporary nature of the "cure," she attached religious significance to it, which Quimby did not. She believed that it was the same type of healing that Jesus had performed. From 1862 to 1865, Quimby and Mary engaged in lengthy discussions about healing methods practiced by Quimby and others.

On February 1, 1866, Mary slipped and fell on ice while walking in Lynn, Massachusetts, causing a spinal injury:

In 1968 she separated from her husband and became a spiritist for a short time before becoming disillusioned with the practice. Her first advertisement for her healing services appeared in the Spiritist newspaper, The Banner of Light in 1868.

In the 24th edition of Science and Health, up to the 33rd edition, Eddy admitted the harmony between Hindu Vedanta philosophy and Christian Science. She also quoted certain passages from an English translation of the Bhagavad Gita, but they were later removed.

Mary was aware of the dark side of spiritual energy work which she called Malicious Animal Magnetism  of M.A.M. As there is no personal devil or evil in Christian Science, M.A.M. became the explanation for the problem of evil. Eddy was concerned that a new practitioner could inadvertently harm a patient through unenlightened use of their mental powers, and that less scrupulous individuals could use as a weapon. At first she was paranoid about this. In 1882 Eddy publicly claimed that her last husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, had died of "mental assassination". Daniel Spofford was another Christian Scientist expelled by Eddy after she accused him of practicing malicious animal magnetism. This gained notoriety in a case irreverently dubbed the "Second Salem Witch Trial."  

As time went on Eddy tried to lessen the focus on animal magnetism within the movement as she came to understand that mental healing or mental cursing (placebo effect) only worked if a person's deep emotions were open to it. 

References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Baker_Eddy

Eddy, Mary (1875) Science and Health    https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Science and Health

(July 6, 2022) Occult and faith based practices come from claimed divine revelations to certain people. This is in contrast to nature based practices which are based knowledge coming from observation and subsequent theory crafting. The Occult had a brief revival during and after the Spiritism era.  

In a reaction against the fraud of Spiritism, the Theosophical Society was formed in New York City in September 1875 with Henry Olcott as the president and Ukrainian émigré Helena Blavatsky as the theorist. Helena was born in what is now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. Its purpose to help free “the public mind of theological superstition and a tame subservience to science” by rational investigation into the spiritual powers. (Lavoie 2012, page 141). Earlier Blavatsky had claimed that lower form elemental spirits were deceiving the mediums based upon the medium's own biases. This idea was rejected by the Spiritists which motivated her to form the Theosophist Society with Olcott.

In 1877 Blavatsky published the founding book of the movement entitled “Isis Unveiled.” She adopted Emerson’s Transcendentalist metaphysics that matter was a manifestation of the Divine and combined that with eastern religious ideas from India entering the West for the first time. 

Although Isis Unveiled attracted attention, the society dwindled. In 1879 Blavatsky and Olcott left New York and went to India. Three years later they established the Theosophical Society headquarters at Adyar near Madras and began publication of the society’s journal, The Theosophist, which Blavatsky edited from 1879 to 1888. Here she changed the society's focus from observation and investigation to promoting revelations coming to herself. In order for her ideas to get noticed she claimed that they were transmitted to her via automatic writings from “mahatmas” in Tibet. The society soon developed a strong following in India among the English speaking community. Branches of the Theosophical Society were soon formed in the U.S., London, and India. 

This was a time of revival for all sorts of occult groups using rediscovered ancient mystical texts which were then being translated into English. Collectively these texts are broadly called Rosicrucian and Hermetic. Most of these texts claim to represent more ancient revealed traditions.

In 1888 a ritualistic occult society inspired by these trends was formed in Britain by Freemasons William Wescott, Samuel Mathers, and William Woodman. They modeled it on the Freemasons but women had full equality. It was called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn which is an important part of our story.

The Golden Dawn consisted of three main levels (Orders) with many sublevels. Its first Order taught personal development through study and awareness based on the four classical elements, as well as the basics of astrology, tarot divination, and geomancy. The second Order got members ready to work with revelations by teaching scrying, astral travel, and alchemy. The Third Order was working with the Secret Chiefs (the Mahatmas of Blavatsky) who directed the activities of the lower two orders by spirit communication with the Third Order members. 

For some reason William Wescott quit in 1897 At that time his partner Samuel Mathers, claimed that on a visit to Paris he was contacted by the same mahatmas (called the Secret Chiefs) as Blavatsky and they ordered him to establish an inner secret order to the Golden Dawn. This allowed Mathers to eventually take over the whole group in 1897 which he took in the direction of recreating the Egyptian derived Roman mystery religion involving the goddess Isis. Their goal was to gain mystical power by temporarily uniting themselves with various classical divinities. This new direction caused various people to leave the society such that it effectively ended in all but name in 1903. This included Aleister Crowley who desired to experiment with a variety of approaches for gaining spiritual power (Hutton 1999, p 72-83).​

In time Cowley came back and took over the then defunct Order of the Golden Dawn. Crowley was an egotistical, self-centered showman who popularized this group's magical rituals for the growing British tabloid press which loved to print sensationalistic news (Kaczynski 2010). Yet this publicity kept magic in the British public consciousness and was one source of inspiration for Gerald Gardener and Ross Nichols who rejected the whole revealed approach of the occult to found the more nature and ancestral based Wicca and Druidry during the 1950s.

References

(July 6, 2022) In the 1880's Charles and Myrtle Fillmore of Kansas City, Missouri became impressed by the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy after they themselves were healed and desiring to spread that knowledge they launched a newsletter entitled "Modern Thought" in April 1889. Their ideas were further refined by the teachings of a former student of Mary Baker Eddy's named Emma Curtis Hopkins who rejected Mary Baker Eddy's view of Jesus. Mary Baker viewed Jesus as perfection incarnate, the Savior and Messiah. In contrast Hopkins and the Fillmores saw Jesus in Christian Gnostic and Buddhist terms as a man being born mortal but who perfected his divinity over several lifetimes. 

The Fillmores published their praise of Emma Hopkins in their January 1890 edition of Modern Thought magazine shortly after they attended their first public lecture with her:

The Fillmores adopted the magical healing practices of Mary Baker Eddy is shown by this statement from Charles:

This dualist idea that the divine is good and the material world is bad continues to be central in the modern day Unity Movement:

The Unity movement's view of the Divine shows that it has adopted the soft, Buddhist form of dualism in which the material world is imperfect. This view is not the hard dualism of fundamentalist Christians in which the material world is evil and at war with the good divine forces. Still, all dualist thinking leads to the unsolvable conundrum of why a good and perfect God would create an evil or imperfect world allowing pain, and suffering. Unsolvable conundrums are a clue that the metal framework in which the question is posed is wrong.

 During the 1890's H. Emilie Cady, a homeopathic physician, began writing for the Unity movement and her 1901 book "Lessons in Truth." It became the theoretical foundation for the movement. She says this about evil which shows she was struggling with dualism and the differences between soft and hard dualism. Her solution was to treat evil as a delusion. She cannot bring herself to admit that so called negative conscious feelings also represent the Divine:

 The Fillmore's came to view the Unity ideas as "practical Christianity" but by the 1960's the Unity Movement was considered by all other Christian churches to be non-Christian and even heretical. Yet even today, the Unity movement keeps one foot in traditional Christianity with its use of the Bible as an authority and the other foot in mystic Gnostic Christianity with its reliance on direct spiritual insights for knowledge. They always quote a Bible passage in their Daily Word lesson. They make no distinction between personal spiritual knowledge and collective community knowledge as do Nature Pagans. For Nature Pagans, the source for community knowledge is nature which because it is communal knowledge is authoritative. In contrast personal spiritual knowledge is not authoritative but is instead inspirational and motivational. Authoritative knowledge constrains inspirational knowledge.

H. Emily Cady and subsequent Unity teaching have de-emphasized the bodily regeneration part of coming to  highest consciousness as being too Christian. She says, "The possibility of living in these bodies indefinitely seems altogether foolish and shortsighted."

The primary spiritual practice of the Unity movement is opening up emotional/spiritual channels via meditative (prayer) affirmations which in eastern religious traditions are called mantras. Early in the movement they offered such prayer affirmations via phone and by letter which was called Silent Unity. The leader of Silent Unity was James Freeman between 1971 and 2000. He says this about their practice and compares their approach with the typical Christian prayer of petition, Nature Pagans adopted this same self-reliant approach:

One of Freeman's most memorable times on the Unity prayer phone lines is recounted below:

References

 Unity Daily Word Online at http://www.dailyword.com/about

Vahle, Neal (2002) The Unity Movement - Its Evolution and Spiritual Teachings. Templeton Foundation Press