"Mary A. Cornelius: The Occultist of No Lodge" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Toil & Trouble A Women’s History of the Occult"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
September 25
Mary A. Cornelius: The Occultist of No Lodge
Chicago, around the turn of the
century. A widow in her early seventies—a Baptist minister's wife, a former
state president of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, a woman who had
spent decades campaigning to close saloons and protect animals and get books
into the hands of children—publishes a novel. The title page reads The White Flame. Beneath it, in the plainest possible language, sits the subtitle: “an
occult story.”
Nobody at the time seems to have
found this strange.
Mary Ann Mann was born in Pontiac,
Michigan, on September 25, 1829 (although even that much deserves an asterisk:
her memorial record gives 1827; her Illinois death record gives 1829. The
census returns across her lifetime disagree with each other and occasionally
with both.)
She married Samuel Cornelius, a
Baptist pastor, in 1850, and the pulpit he held at First Baptist in Little Rock
put her in Arkansas through the first half of the 1880s, where she served as
president of the state W.C.T.U. and
campaigned to take whole communities dry. Samuel died in 1886, but Mary kept
moving. In Tacoma she established a free reading room and circulating library
for the young—built, in no small part, out of volumes that had been “discarded
by the public library as too worn for further service,” patched back together
and put into circulation again. In Tacoma and later in Topeka she served as a
director of the humane society. She favored woman's suffrage. She wrote travel
pieces for the newspapers about the new railroads, and by the accounts of those
who read them, she wrote them well.
Over the next thirty years she
published four novels: Little Wolf, A Tale of the Western Frontier
in 1872; Uncle Nathan's Farm with Laird & Lee of Chicago in 1898; The
White Flame around 1900; and Why! or a Kansas Girl's Query in 1903.
She died in Chicago on April 18, 1918, at eighty-eight, and was buried at
Oakland-Fraternal Cemetery.
However, to many, her literary legacy
rests on The White Flame. It was published by the Stockham Publishing Company of
Chicago—which is to say, by Alice Bunker Stockham. Stockham was the fifth woman in the United States to qualify as a
physician, working as an obstetrician and gynecologist who lectured against
corsets, argued for dress reform and birth control and women's rights,
advocated total abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, and wrote Tokology
and, more notoriously, Karezza, a book on sexual continence within
marriage that made her one of the most controversial medical figures in
America. (In fact, Leo Tolstoy and Havelock Ellis were among her friends and
correspondents.)
So, an occult novel written by a
temperance-movement stalwart and minister's widow came out from the press of
the country's most scandalous sex-reform physician, who was herself a committed
teetotaler. To a modern reader that reads as a collision of worlds, and this is
the thing most of us get backwards about the American nineteenth century. We
inherit a tidy filing system in which temperance, suffrage, humane societies,
and public education go in one drawer marked respectable reform—while
Spiritualism, Theosophy, New Thought, and occult fiction go in another marked
fringe. The people living it recognized no such partition. The same women
turned up at the same lecture halls, subscribed to the same periodicals, sat on
the same boards, and used the same handful of sympathetic presses. A woman who
believed the world could be reformed by act of will was not making a leap when
she also believed the world contained forces that act of will might reach.
The White Flame, though rare, it not truly lost: the
Library of Congress holds a complete digitized scan, several hundred pages,
free to read, available to anyone with an internet connection. The reason is
simpler and stranger; almost nobody has read it. There is no critical
literature on this novel; there is no scholarly treatment, no plot summary
worth the name, no reception history, and no serious reading by anyone in more
than a century.
Which raises the question: how does
someone with a documented public career, four published novels, and a state
presidency behind her become invisible? It isn't that she was obscure in her own lifetime. She has an
entry in Frances Willard
and Mary Livermore's
A Woman of the Century, published in 1893—the standard biographical dictionary of
notable American women of the era, the volume you appeared in precisely because
you were not obscure.
Historically, occult canons are built
by organizations, not by merit. A figure survives in esoteric history roughly
in proportion to how many people had an institutional stake in remembering
them. Orders keep archives; lodges reprint their founders. And lineages
maintain their dead, because the legitimacy of the living depends on it.
Cornelius had none of that: no order, no temple, no initiatory line, no
disciples, no correspondence with famous magicians, nobody downstream whose
standing required that her name persist. What she had was the W.C.T.U., and the
W.C.T.U. had absolutely no interest in preserving her occult novel.
So, she fell between the categories,
and stayed there. Too devout and too respectable for the historians of
occultism, too occult for the historians of temperance, too minor for the
literary scholars. Four novels and a lifetime of public work, and the filing
system had no drawer for her.
Cornelius spent part of her life
gathering up books that other people had thrown away as too damaged to bother
with, mending them, and putting them back where someone might find them.
TOIL & TROUBLE: A Women’s History of the Occult
Lisa
Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson / Quirk
Books, Philadelphia, 2022
Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson,
who first surveyed the neglected women of horror fiction in Monster, She
Wrote, turn their attention here to the neglected women of American
occultism, and the book they’ve built reads less like an argument than an
excavation. Spiritualist mediums who parlayed séance rooms into public
influence, Tituba and the accused of Salem; Joan Quigley (Nancy Reagan’s
personal psychic); Pamela Smith (the uncredited artist behind the Rider-Waite-Smith
deck); Bri Luna (“the Hoodwitch”); and the “Mistress of the Dark” herself, Elvira—Kröger
and Anderson move through more than a century and a half of American women who
used magic and mysticism to claim an authority a patriarchal culture withheld
from them by every other means. What holds the book together isn’t a single
thesis so much as a repeated pattern: women pushed to the margins of
respectable religion and respectable reform alike, finding in the occult a
space where the margins themselves became usable.
With this excellent and important treatise, Kröger
and Anderson are doing, at scale and with the resources of a real publishing
house behind them, exactly the work this column tries to do in miniature each
week: pulling women who got filed under the wrong heading back into a legible
lineage. Read Cornelius’s entry above, then read this book, and you are
watching two different scales of the same project: the recovery of women whose
spiritual lives did not fit the categories historians built to organize the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Toil & Trouble is currently in print and widely
available at any bookseller you prefer, and it reads well for both the newcomer
and the reader who already knows most of the names. We highly recommend it!
(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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