The Story of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland and of the New Gospel of Interpretation

CHAPTER II.. The Initiation.

THE INITIATION.

A baptism of the Spirit--"At last I have found a man through whom I can speak!"--Intimation of the nature and aim of their work--The Doomed train, "No one on the engine!"--Instantaneous transfer of inspiration--"Woman, what have I to do with thee?"--The recovery of a Gospel scene, and its import--"The woman taken in adultery"--Vision of Adonai--Source of the opening sentences in St. John's Gospel--Chapter from the recovered Gnosis--The Generation of the Word. 37-70

CHAPTER III.. The Communication.

THE COMMUNICATION.

The perfect love that casts out fear." In the presence of celestial visitants--A parable of the Intuition--"The Wonderful Spectacles"--The Greek element in the work--Hermes and John the Baptist--The "heresy of Prometheus"--The Fig-tree, a symbol of the inward understanding; the time come for it to bear fruit--The Seeress's faculty--Her relations with Hermes--"Thou art the Rock" addressed to Hermes--The parable of the Fig-tree--The Mystic Woman of Holy Writ--"Go thy way, Daniel.... Thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days"--The prophecy of the book of Esther--The Angel Genius, his account of himself and his office--Divine revelation the supreme common sense--The source and method of the New Revelation--Its chief recipient "not a medium or a seer, but a prophet"--An instruction and a caution concerning the survival of tendencies encouraged in past lives--Communion with souls of the departed--The conditions of such intercourse--An instruction concerning Inspiration and Prophesying--The prophecy of "the kingdom of the Mother of God." 71-108

CHAPTER IV.. The Antagonisation.

THE ANTAGONISATION.

"Ye are not yet perfected"--Our respective Auras--An exhortation--The Seven Spirits of God, their co-operation necessary for a perfect work--"You belong to us now, to do our work and not your own"--Enforced silence--"The Powers of the Air;" their mode of attack--A strange visitant and his communication--A strained situation--Visions of guidance--The "refractory team," and the "Two Stars"--The promised land reached only through the wilderness--"The Word a Word of mystery, and they who guard it Seven"--"One Neophyte could not save himself"--A Horoscope--A descent into hell--Counsels of Perfection--A "Merry Christmas"--A timely arrival--Neoplatonic recognition of Hermes--The one Truth, never without a witness in the world--The key of knowledge restored--Problems solved--The mystic "Woman" of Holy Writ. 109-141

CHAPTER V.. The Recapitulation.

THE RECAPITULATION.

The key to the mystery of the Bible; the "Veil of Moses" withdrawn--The secret laid bare of the world's sacrificial system, and the feud between priest and prophet--The Memory of the Soul--The Standpoint of the Bible--All that is true is Spiritual--The revelation of "that wicked one"--The seals broken and the books opened--The New Gospel of Interpretation--Sacerdotalism the "Jerusalem which killed the prophets"--The suppressed doctrines--Reincarnation the corollary and condition of Regeneration and implicit in the Bible--"Ye must be born again of Virgin Mary and Holy Ghost"--The doctrines of the Trinity and Divine Incarnation as now interpreted, necessary and self-evident truths--Evolution the manifestation of a divine inherency; accomplished only by the realisation of Divinity--The process of regeneration, and therein of salvation, interior to the individual--Adam and Christ the initial and final stages in the spiritual evolution of every man--The "Christ within" of St Paul--The Credo an epitome of the spiritual history of the Sons of God. 142-162

CHAPTER VI.. The Exemplification.

THE EXEMPLIFICATION.

Spontaneity of the Seeress's faculty--Specific illuminations, in illustration, chiefly, of the process of Regeneration; concerning (1) Holy Writ; (2) Redemption; (3) Sin and death; (4) The Twelve Gates of Regeneration; (5) The Passage of the Soul; (6) The Mystic Exodus; (7) The Spiritual Phoibos and the order of the Christs; (8) The Previous Lives of Jesus, and Reincarnation; (9) The Work of Power; the land and tongue of the New Revelation, why ours. 163-183

CHAPTER VII.. The Promulgation and Recognition.

THE PROMULGATION AND RECOGNITION.

Accordance of all the dates with those prophesied--Other coincidences--Why our work has remained so long unknown to the generality--Notable recognitions, by representative Kabalists, Mystics, Occultists and Divines, Catholic, Anglican, and others--Spiritualism, Theosophy, and the New Gospel of Interpretation as fellow-agents in the unfoldment of the world's spiritual consciousness, and the unsealing of the world's Bibles, prophesied to take place at this epoch--"Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," the Hebrew equivalents for Brahma, Isis, and Iacchos, to denote the mysteries of India, Egypt, and Greece, the Spirit, the Soul, and the Body, and therein the Gnosis of which the Christ is the fulfilment and personal demonstration, and the restoration of which was prophesied by Jesus as to mean the Regeneration of the Church and the establishment of the divine kingdom on earth--Mysticism and Occultism, the distinction between them, and the necessity of both physical and spiritual science to a perfect system of thought and rule of life--Conclusion. 184-204

ABBREVIATIONS.

A.K., for Anna Kingsford.

B.O.A.I., for "The Bible's Own Account of Itself," by E.M.; second edition, 1905.

C.W.S., for "Clothed With The Sun," being the book of the Illuminations of A.K.; edited by E.M., 1889.

D. and D.-S., for "Dreams and Dream-Stones," by A.K., edited by E.M.; second edition, 1888.

E.C.U., for "The Esoteric Christian Union," founded by E.M. in 1891.

E. and I., for "England and Islam; or, The Counsel of Caiaphas," by E.M., 1877.

E.M., for Edward Maitland.

Life A.K., for "The Life of Anna Kingsford," by E.M., 1896.

P.W., for "The Perfect Way; or, The Finding of Christ," by A.K. and E.M.; third edition, revised, 1890.

Statement, E.C.U., for "The New Gospel of Interpretation; being an Abstract of the Doctrine and Statement of the Objects of the Esoteric Christian Union," by E.M.; revised and enlarged edition, 1892.

BIRMINGHAM: THE RUSKIN PRESS, RUSKIN HOUSE, STAFFORD STREET. 1905.

THE

STORY OF ANNA KINGSFORD AND

EDWARD MAITLAND

AND

OF THE NEW GOSPEL OF

INTERPRETATION.

CHAPTER I.. The Vocation.

THE VOCATION.

My colleague in the work, the history of which I am about to render some account, was the late Anna Kingsford, nee Bonus, M.D. of the University of Paris.

There was a link between her husband's family and mine, but we were not personally acquainted until, in the summer of 1873, she was led by reading one of my books to open a correspondence with me, which disclosed so striking a community between us of ideas, aims, and methods, that I accepted an invitation to visit her at her husband's rectory at Pontesbury, Salop, in Shropshire, for the sake of a fuller discussion of them. This visit which lasted nearly a fortnight, took place in February, 1874.

The account I received of her history was in this wise. Born at Stratford, in Essex, on the 16th September, 1846, long after the last of her many brothers and sisters, and endowed with the most fragile of constitutions and liabilities the most distressing of bodily weakness and suffering, and differing widely, moreover, in temperament from all with whom she was associated, her young life had enjoyed but a scanty share of human sympathy, and was largely one of solitude and meditation, and such as to foster the highly artistic, idealistic, and mystic tendencies with which she was born. Singularly energetic of will, and conscious of powers both transcending in degree and differing in kind from any that she recognised in others, she assiduously exercised her faculties in many and various directions in the hope of discovering the special direction in which her mission lay. For, from her earliest childhood she had been conscious of a mission, for the accomplishment of which she had expressly come into the earth-life. And she claimed even to have distinct recollection of having been strongly dissuaded from coming, on account of the terrible suffering which awaited her in the event of her assuming a body of flesh. Indeed, so little conscious was she of the reality of her human parentage that she was wont to look upon herself as a suppositious child of fairy origin; and on her first visit to the pantomime, when the fairies made their appearance on the stage, she declared that they were her proper people, and cried and struggled to get to them with such vehemence that it was necessary to remove her from the theatre. Among her amusements, her chief delight was in the ample gardens around her homes at Stratford and Blackheath, where she would hold familiar converse with the flowers, putting into their petals tiny notes for her lost relatives, the fairies, who in return would visit her in her dreams and assure her of their continued affection, and counsel her to have patience and courage.

The chief occupation of her girlhood was the writing of poems and tales which were tinged with an exquisite mysticism, and showed a ripeness of soul and maturity of feeling and knowledge wholly unaccountable for by her years, her experiences, or her physical heredity. At school she always obtained the first prizes for composition, and her faculty of improvisation was the delight of her companions; the subjects of these her earlier romances being lovely princesses, gallant knights, castles, dragons, and the like, when--as may readily be supposed--her tall and slender frame, long golden hair, delicacy of complexion, deep-set hazel eyes, beauty of feature, the brow and the mouth being especially notable, the brightness of her looks, vivacity of her manner, her musical voice, and the easy eloquence of her diction,--all combined to make her an ideal heroine for her own romances. She could hardly, however, be said to be a persona grata with her pastors and masters. For while her independence of character and strength of will were apt to bring her into conflict with rules and regulations of which she failed to recognise the need, her thirst for knowledge, especially on religious subjects, prompted her to the proposition of questions which were highly embarrassing to her teachers; and nothing that they could say succeeded in convincing her that her duty lay in believing what she was told, and not in understanding it. She very early learnt to resent the disabilities of her sex, and to insist that they were not real but artificial, the result of masculine selfishness and injustice. This hatred of injustice and its correlative cruelty, especially towards animals, attained in her the force and dignity of a passion, her sensitiveness on this score making the chief mental misery of her life.

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