ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 4
Frank L. Baum Joins the Theosophical Society
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Three
years apart, on the exact same calendar date, two of the Theosophical Society's
most consequential moments took place. On September 4th, 1889, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott arrived in
London and, at Helena Blavatsky's own residence, met Annie Besant for the first time, the
beginning of a partnership that would eventually place Besant at the helm of
the entire international movement. Exactly three years later, on September 4th,
1892, in Chicago, a struggling writer named Lyman Frank Baum and his wife Maud filled
out their own membership applications to the Theosophical Society's Ramayana
branch. Eight years after that, Baum would publish The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and
generations of readers since have argued fiercely, and inconclusively, about
exactly how much of what he wrote traces back to that day in London's shadow.
Both
events are solidly documented. What's been built on top of the second one
deserves rather more scrutiny than it usually receives…
Follow the Yellow Brick Road…
The
Olcott-Besant meeting is, on its own, one of the genuinely important hinges in
Theosophical history, and it needs no embellishment to earn that status.
Besant, already a prominent secularist, feminist, and social reformer, had been
assigned to review Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine” for the Pall Mall Gazette
that same year, an assignment that led directly to her own conversion to
Theosophy. Meeting Olcott, the Society's co-founder and first president, at
Blavatsky's own London home set the stage for a working relationship that would
eventually see Besant succeed Olcott as the Society's second international
president after his death in 1907, a position she'd hold for over two decades.
Few single meetings in the movement's history carry more downstream
institutional weight.
Baum's membership is equally well documented, verified directly through the Theosophical Society's own Pasadena archives: Lyman F. Baum and Maud G. Baum, both of Chicago, admitted to the Ramayana Theosophical Society on September 4th, 1892, on the recommendation of Dr. W. P. Phelon, with permanent diplomas issued that December. Baum likely first encountered Theosophy through his mother-in-law, the pioneering feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who had joined the Society seven years earlier, and his own newspaper writing shows him engaging with Theosophical ideas in print as early as 1890, two years before he formally joined.
Since
1986, when Theosophical scholar John Algeo published an influential piece in
The American Theosophist declaring The Wizard of Oz “Theosophical
allegory... pervaded by Theosophical ideas from beginning to end,” that reading
has circulated widely as settled fact. It is not the only confident
interpretive theory built on Baum's biography, however, and the existence of a
serious rival should give any single reading pause. Since 1964, an entirely
separate school of literary criticism, launched by historian Henry Littlefield and developed further by
economist Hugh Rockoff, has argued the book is actually a Populist allegory
about the late-nineteenth-century gold standard debate, the “Yellow Brick Road”
as the gold standard,
Dorothy's silver slippers, changed to ruby only for the 1939 film, as the “Free Silver” movement. Both camps write
with total confidence. Both cannot be simultaneously correct as the book's
single “true” hidden meaning, and literary historians examining both theories
have generally treated each as a compelling but unproven interpretive overlay
rather than confirmed authorial intent.
Baum's own stated account of his purpose only complicates both interpretations. In his 1900 introduction, he wrote that the book “was written solely to please children of today,” explicitly aiming to strip out the “heart-aches and nightmares” and moralizing baggage of older fairy tales, not to smuggle in a systematic allegory of any kind, political or spiritual. That's not necessarily the final word; authors aren't always the most reliable narrators of their own unconscious influences, and Baum's biographer Katherine Rogers takes a more measured middle position, arguing Theosophy shaped the general sensibility of Baum's fantasy writing, its vision of a reality beyond the visible world, without requiring readers to accept a card-by-card, character-by-character decoder key.
While,
Baum's Theosophical membership is real, verified, and dated with archival
precision, his general engagement with the movement's ideas, spiritual growth,
a reality beyond the material world, a universalist approach to religion,
plausibly did feed the imaginative register of a book about a girl discovering
that the power she needed was within her all along. Whether Baum sat down and
deliberately encoded the Tin Man as a Theosophical symbol for something
specific is a different, considerably less certain claim, one competing
interpretive camps have been confidently making in opposite directions for over
sixty years now.
Modern Occultist is proud to present today's “Daily Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult Reads... Today, in honor of the meeting that helped shape the movement Baum would join three years later, we're recommending the foundational text both Olcott and Besant built their life's work around…
By
H. P. Blavatsky | Red Wheel/Weiser
Originally
published in 1888, a year before the Olcott-Besant meeting that anchors half of
today's post, The Secret Doctrine remains, in Weiser's own description,
“perhaps the most definitive work on esoteric wisdom ever written,” Blavatsky's
sprawling attempt to synthesize the origins of the cosmos and the prehistory of
humanity into a single cosmological system. This is the very text Besant was
reviewing for the Pall Mall Gazette when her own path toward Theosophy began,
making it a direct, documented cause of the London meeting described above.
Reading
Blavatsky's actual cosmology firsthand offers useful grounding for evaluating
claims like Algeo's about Baum: readers can judge for themselves how specific
and systematized Theosophical doctrine actually was in this period, and decide
independently how plausible it is that a popular children's author was working
with anything like this degree of technical precision when he sent a girl down
a yellow road in search of a wizard.
This
is dense, foundational occult literature rather than light reading, originally
intended, as Blavatsky herself noted, as “a stimulus” for further inquiry
rather than a final word. But for readers of this magazine wanting to
understand the actual doctrinal water Olcott, Besant, and eventually the Baums
were all swimming in, there's no substitute for going to the source.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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