Abstract
Despite being isolated in a small town in rural Missouri, his extensive international correspondence, his rare book collection, his editorial work for the journal The Platonist, and his leadership involvement in the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor set Thomas Moore Johnson (1851–1919) at the center of a network of ideas and activities that characterized the blossoming of the Anglo-American interest in esotericism and the occult in the 1870s–1880s.
However, Johnson did not only contribute to the transfer of esoteric ideas, but also to the construction of a peculiar notion of esotericism. Although often described as an unoriginal thinker because of his view of Platonic philosophy as an authoritative body of perennial truth, the “Sage of the Osage” developed an idiosyncratic understanding of secret religious wisdom by embracing both Eastern and Western ideas and practices, including Yoga, Sufism, and Kabbalah. In this sense, Johnson manifests his intellectual independence—his “heretical orthodoxy”—at a time when the occultist groups he was affiliated with are parting ways over which esotericism—Eastern or Western—deserves to be followed.
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Notes
- 1.
For a full biography of Thomas Moore Johnson, see Paul Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 153–154. See also Patrick D. Bowen, “Magicians, Muslims, and Metaphysicians: The American Esoteric Avant-Garde in Missouri, 1880–1889,” Theosophical History 17 (2014): 49–51.
- 2.
Although in 1999 a foundation was established for the preservation, promotion, and study of Thomas Moore Johnson and his descendants’ work, their collection of writings, and other rare objects, a single complete catalogue of the Johnson Library and Museum holdings is currently still unavailable. Most of Johnson’s philosophy books were donated to the University of Missouri library in 1947, while part of his materials is currently kept at the Special Collections and Archives section of Missouri State University’s Meyer Library. As for Johnson’s correspondence, while the collection of extant letters has been fully catalogued, and a significant portion of it has recently been published—see Patrick D. Bowen and K. Paul Johnson, eds., Letters to the Sage: Selected Correspondence of Thomas Moore Johnson (Forest Grove: The Typhon Press, vol. 1 2016, vol. 2 2018)—it should be noted that, except for four missives Johnson himself penned, such collection only comprises letters that other individuals sent to him.
- 3.
On the town of Osceola in the nineteenth century and beyond, see Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 151–152.
- 4.
On this institution, see Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 2–6, and the bibliography listed there.
- 5.
On these clubs see Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 6–7. Other short-lived Plato Clubs existed in Decatur and Bloomington, Illinois. The main animating force behind the Plato Clubs and other similarly oriented US philosophical societies in the 1860s–1890s was Hiram Jones, with whom Johnson corresponded for over two decades. For Jones and his activities, see Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, chs. II and III; Jay Bregman, “The Neoplatonic Revival in North America,” Hermathena 149 (1990): 113.
- 6.
For this unsuccessful experiment, see Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 163.
- 7.
For Johnson’s complaints about his situation, see Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 157; Natalie Whitaker, “Owner of a Lonely Heart: Reading the Occult in Nineteenth Century Missouri” (paper presented at the Craft Critique Culture Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference: Bridging Divides, Iowa City, IA, April 2016), 3–4; 7–8; 20.
- 8.
On this point, see also Bowen, “Magicians,” 48–49.
- 9.
While the first names Ralph and Waldo might be taken as an homage to R. W. Emerson, whom Johnson, as we shall see, indeed admired, it is much more likely that Waldo P. was actually named after his paternal grandfather, Sen. Waldo Porter Johnson. Similarly, Franklin P. may have been named after his maternal uncle Robert Franklin Barr (see Journal of the Johnson Library and Museum 4 (2010): 72–79). Johnson also had a daughter, Helen, who was one of the first women in the United States to earn a doctorate in Classics and Sanskrit (she received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1912) and became a respected scholar of Jainism. See John Cort, “Helen M. Johnson: The First American Woman Scholar of Sanskrit,” Journal of the Johnson Library and Museum 3 (2009): 31–47.
- 10.
See Jay Bregman, “Thomas M. Johnson the Platonist,” Dionysus 15 (1991): 91–102; Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 7.
- 11.
For this episode, see Thomas Moore Johnson, “Introduction,” in Proclus, Metaphysical Elements (Osceola: Republican Press, 1909), xiii-xvi, reprinted in Journal of the Johnson Library and Museum 3 (2009): 14–17.
- 12.
Quoted from Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 156.
- 13.
On these influences, see Bregman, “Thomas M. Johnson,” 91, 105–106.
- 14.
For a complete list and discussion of Johnson’s translations of Neoplatonic texts, see Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 173; Jay Bregman, “Preface,” in The Collected Works of Thomas Moore Johnson: The Great American Platonist (Westbury: Prometheus Trust, 2015), iv-ix.
- 15.
The third periodical was the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, edited by Harris.
- 16.
The Platonist I (1881), 1.
- 17.
Johnson, “Introduction,” xv.
- 18.
Johnson, “Introduction,” xv.
- 19.
Johnson, “Introduction,” xvi.
- 20.
The Platonist III (1887), 1.
- 21.
The Platonist I (1881), 1.
- 22.
On this notion, see Bregman (“Thomas M. Johnson”), who calls Johnson a “pagan–Christian syncretist” (p. 96) in the spirit of “Renaissance syncretism” (p. 102).
- 23.
Johnson himself used this phrase—see The Platonist II (1884), 1, as discussed in Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 55; 62—to refer to the American Akademe’s interest for various viewpoints in religion without loyalty to any. For this Platonic organization and Johnson’s involvement in it, see Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 52–68.
- 24.
It appears that Johnson had a complex relationship with Christianity. According to his son Franklin—see The Thomas Moore Johnson Collection (Columbia: University of Missouri, 1949), 5—he was scornful of it in his youth, but later developed an appreciation for Christian theologians such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and even considered joining—quite logically—a Unitarian church. Bregman (see his preface to The Collected Works of Thomas Moore Johnson, i) has suggested that while Johnson’s early reading of Emerson contributed to his distaste for institutionalized, dominant Christianity, he acknowledged the latter “as part of a syncretistic synthesis with Platonism” (p. iv). Indeed, as Johnson himself stated in The Platonist (II, 1884, 1), he believed in “the harmony of the teachings of pure Christianity with the esoteric doctrines of the various ancient faiths.” In this sense, much like, as I will argue, Jewish Kabbalah and Sufism, this form of “pure,” Neoplatonically bent Christianity represents another piece of the puzzle in Johnson’s “Western esotericism.”
- 25.
For various definitions of Western esotericism, including this “religionist” one, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1–14 (and pp. 10–12 in particular). For another perspective, see Kocku von Stuckrad, “Western Esotericism: Towards an Integrative Model of Interpretation,” Religion 35 (2005): 78–97. As we shall see, among other factors, Johnson’s longstanding engagement with Indian and Persian traditions including Sufism and yoga might make the descriptor “Western” problematic to apply to the form of esotericism he was after. Indeed, the overall scholarly use of this “Western” category in the study of esotericism has been criticized in Kennet Granholm, “Locating the West: Problematizing the Western in Western Esotericism and Occultism,” in Occultism in a Global Perspective, eds. Henrik Bogdan and Gordan Djurdjevic (Durham: Acumen, 2013), 31–32 as well as in Egil Asprem, “Beyond the West: Towards a New Comparativism in the Study of Esotericism,” Correspondences 2 (2014): 4; 7–11. My provisional use of the term “Western” is intended to signal that Johnson—a Westerner—accessed all kinds of esoteric wisdom invariably through the mediation of translations and presentations prepared by, and explicitly intended for, Westerners—mostly in connection with the Theosophical Society.
- 26.
On this point, see Bregman, “Thomas M. Johnson,” 92; 108. See also Julie Chajes, Recycled Lives: A History of Reincarnation in Blavatsky’s Theosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 108–131.
- 27.
See Vadim Putzu, “Kabbalah in the Ozarks: Thomas Moore Johnson, The Platonist, and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor,” in Kabbalah in America, ed. Brian Ogren (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 96–98.
- 28.
To be precise, Ginsburg was born into a Jewish family, but eventually converted to Christianity.
- 29.
Specifically, Johnson owned Lévi’s 1861 Dogme et rituel de la haute magie as well as The Mysteries of Magic, an 1886 English language digest of Lévi’s writings. For Johnson’s special fascination with Lévi, see infra.
- 30.
Adolphe Louis Constant, aka Eliphas Lévi (1810–1875) was a Parisian Catholic seminary student turned occultist, whom scholars typically view as the last Christian kabbalist but also as the initiator of nineteenth-century occultist Kabbalah. For our purposes, it is worth noting that, in his essay on Lévi’s understanding of Kabbalah—see Wouter J. Hanegraaff, “The Beginnings of Occultist Kabbalah: Adolphe Franck and Éliphas Lévi,” in Kabbalah and Modernity: Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations, eds. Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi, and Kocku von Stuckrad, (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 107–128—Hanegraaff argues that Lévi’s perspective is a form of non-historical perennialism grounded in the prisca theologia tradition of the Renaissance.
- 31.
Recurring Jewish authors featured in Johnson’s collection of Kabbalistic works are Neoplatonic thinkers such as Solomon ibn Gabirol, Azriel of Gerona, Abraham Cohen de Herrera, and Leone Ebreo.
- 32.
A prominent Theosophical Society member and Madame Blavatsky’s physician, in 1877 Pancoast published The Kabbala: The True Science of Light, combining non-Jewish esotericism with contemporary science and medicine. See Julie Chajes, “Seth Pancoast and the Kabbalah: Medical Pluralism and the Reception of Physics in Late-Nineteenth Century Philadelphia,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 40 (2018): 131–162. Despite being hailed by fellow Theosophists as the most competent Kabbalist in the United States at the time, apparently Pancoast never succeeded in winning Johnson over with his version of Kabbalah (see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 339).
- 33.
For the vicissitudes of The Platonist, see Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 170–173.
- 34.
The Platonist I (1881), 1.
- 35.
The Platonist III (1887), 1. The broadening of the scope of the materials published in this journal beyond Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy was already in the making since 1884, as testified by Johnson’s salutatory to volume 2 (1884), 1–2.
- 36.
“Kabalistic Doctrine of Spirits,” The Platonist II (1884), 14–16; 19–24. Translated from the French by Abner Doubleday.
- 37.
“Solution of Philosophical Problems” and “The Magnetic Mysteries,” The Platonist II (1885), 130–131 and 131–132 respectively. Translated from French by William Trockmorton.
- 38.
This project was announced in January 1887, in the first issue of The Platonist III, 29. For more details on Johnson’s failed attempt, see Putzu, “Kabbalah in the Ozarks,” 97–98; 100.
- 39.
See his announcement in The Platonist II (1885), 129. For Lévi’s statement on the importance of both Sefer Yezirah and the writings collected in Kabbala Denudata for a correct understanding of Kabbalah, see for example his Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (Paris: Germer Baillere, 1861) as translated in Arthur Waite, The Mysteries of Magic: A Digest of the Writings of Eliphas Lévi (London: George Redway, 1886), 18.
- 40.
“Notes on the Kabbalah,” The Platonist III (1887), 23–36 and 91–101. The other main source for Johnson’s compilation is Ginsburg, whom he must have appreciated for maintaining that Kabbalah’s distinctive tenets derive from Neoplatonism. For a detailed analysis of Johnson’s “Notes on the Kabbalah,” see Putzu, “Kabbalah in the Ozarks,” 100–103.
- 41.
“The Taro,” The Platonist II (1885), 126–128.
- 42.
Burgoyne, born Thomas Henry Dalton (1855–1943?) was a British astrologer and self-professed medium, who served as the “private secretary of the exterior circle” of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, and authored several of the group’s fundamental texts. His most influential publication, The Light of Egypt, was translated in multiple European languages and attracted the attention of the famous French occultist Papus. On Burgoyne/Dalton see Joscelyn Godwin, Christian Chanel, and John P. Deveney, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor: Initiatic and Historical Documents of an Order of Practical Occultism (York Beach: Samuel Weiser, 1995), 33–39; Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 122–123.
- 43.
See “The Kabbalah,” The Platonist III (1887), 106–112.
- 44.
See “The Taro,” The Platonist III (1887), 354–357; 407–410; 478–482; 571–576; 655–660; and IV (1888), 41–47. For the influence of Lévi’s and Christian’s teachings on this essay, see Godwin, Chanel and Deveney, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor , 379. Paul Christian (real name Jean-Baptiste Pitois, 1811–1877) was the author of a widely read Historie de la Magie, du monde Surnaturel et de la fatalité à travers les Temps et les Peuples (1870), which was translated into English by Doubleday in 1884 (see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 159–162).
- 45.
For a discussion of Burgoyne’s writings, including those published under the pseudonym “Zanoni,” see Godwin, Chanel and Deveney, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor , 37–39; Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 122–123.
- 46.
See The Platonist III (1887), 26–27. Despite drawing from the neoplatonizer Ginsburg, here Johnson further remarks that Kabbalistic ideas about the preexistence and transmigration of human souls need to be interpreted neoplatonically in order to be correctly understood.
- 47.
See The Platonist IV (1888), 212–224; 225–231; 281–298. Synesius (c. 373–410) was a Greek-speaking pagan philosopher who converted to Christianity in Alexandria of Egypt and eventually became the bishop of Ptolemais. On Synesius’ syncretism and its influence among American Transcendentalists and Theosophists more generally, see Jay Bregman, “Synesius of Cyrene and the American ‘Synesii’,” Numen 63 (2016): 299–316.
- 48.
See Isaac Myer, Qabbalah. Philadelphia, 1888. On this work and its author, see Boaz Huss “The Qabbalah of the Hebrews and the Ancient Wisdom Religion of Asia: Isaac Myer and the Kabbalah in America,” in Kabbalah in America, 72–93. In the only extant letter he sent to Johnson (Myer to Johnson, November 5, 1888, unpublished letter), while not mentioning Kabbalah at all, Myer discusses the possible Indian origins of certain Neoplatonic doctrines.
- 49.
See The Platonist III (1887), 561–571.
- 50.
Wilder (1823–1908) was a pioneer of holistic medicine and a polyglot interested in various forms of esoteric thinking, including Platonism and transcendentalism. As a professional editor, he worked on Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled in 1876 as well as for multiple journals, including Johnson’s The Platonist and Bibliotheca Platonica. For more on Wilder, see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 2, 13–62.
- 51.
See The Platonist III (1887), 567–568. On Sefer ha-Zohar and its reception among nineteenth-century esotericists see, among others, Boaz Huss, “Admiration and Disgust: The Ambivalent Re-Canonization of the Zohar in the Modern Period,” in Study and Knowledge in Jewish Thought, ed. Howard Kreisel (Beer-Sheva: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2006), 203–237; Boaz Huss, “Translations of the Zohar: Historical Contexts and Ideological Frameworks,” Correspondences 4 (2016), 81–128.
- 52.
Schreiber (1852–1932) was a German-born American Reform rabbi and scholar, who was heavily influenced by the teachings of Abraham Geiger, Moritz Lazarus, and Manuel Joel. On Schreiber, see Frederick Haneman, “Schreiber, Emanuel,” Jewish Encyclopedia 11 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1906), 110.
- 53.
See The Platonist III (1887), 423–434.
- 54.
See The Platonist III (1887), 495–502.
- 55.
See “Life of Hay ebn Yokdan [sic], The self-taught Philosopher,” The Platonist I (1881–1882), 75–80; 162–164; II (1884), 3–4; 62–64; III (1887), 163–168; 225–235; 332–336; 410–416.
- 56.
See The Platonist I (1881–82), 172–179.
- 57.
See Bowen, “Magicians,” 40.
- 58.
See The Platonist III (1887), 296–308; 660–670; IV (1888), 48–56; 102–107; 136–144; 183–195. For more on Ruswa, see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 443–445.
- 59.
See Johnson’s footnote in The Platonist III (1887), 139: “Sufism originated long anterior to the Mohamedan invasion of India. It came from the Platonic fount.”
- 60.
See The Platonist III (1887), 391–392. See also the Sufi poems published in The Platonist III (1887), 368–371.
- 61.
Tellingly, the two essays by Bjerregaard that Johnson chose to include in his journal are “The Historic Position and Value of Neo-Platonism &c.,” The Platonist III (1887), 36–38, and “Papers on Sufism,” The Platonist III (1887), 190–198; 262–265; 403–407. In the latter article, Bjerregaard highlights the parallelism between Sufi, Gnostic, and Kabbalistic metaphysics (p. 405), thereby betraying his syncretic, perennialist attitude, much like Johnson’s. For more on Bjerregaard, theosophy, and Sufism, see Mark Sedgwick, Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 146–148.
- 62.
See Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 195–196.
- 63.
See The Platonist III (1887), 224.
- 64.
See Bowen, “Magicians,” 40; Sedgwick, Western Sufism, 143–146.
- 65.
See Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 196.
- 66.
See Bowen, “Magicians,” 44; Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 80–81.
- 67.
See especially Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 67; 151–85.
- 68.
Johnson officially joined the Theosophical Society in 1883, and was appointed to its American Board of Control in 1884. In that same year he joined the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, and became President of its American Central Council (aka the Committee of Seven) in 1886.
- 69.
See especially Anderson (Platonism in the Midwest, 175–176), who claims that, beginning with volume III (1887), Johnson expanded the scope of The Platonist to include articles on “the oriental mysteries and the occult” only to seek more subscribers among Theosophical Society members and people interested in then fashionable esotericism. Actually, as mentioned above, The Platonist had already included occult material since vol. II (1884), which features in its first two issues Doubleday’s translation of Eliphas Lévi’s Science des esprits.
- 70.
See Hanegraff, Western Esotericism, 10–12.
- 71.
On Neoplatonism among Theosophists, see Bregman, “Thomas M. Johnson,” 92; 108; Bregman, “Synesius,” 300. For the affinities between Platonism and the metaphysics of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, see Godwin, Chanel and Deveney, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor , 50–51.
- 72.
Bowen (see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 74–76) suggests that by 1887 Johnson’s involvement with the Theosophical Society completely ceased, and that he no longer served any role in the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor after 1893. However, his correspondence with Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor members such as Minnie Higgin and Helen Sumner continued until 1894, and with Sylvester Gould until 1907 (see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 185–186; 188; 453–455). Even more significantly, despite the 1885–86 feud between the Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (for which see Godwin, Chanel and Deveney, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor , 306; 329–340), Johnson was still amicably corresponding with prominent Theosophical Society members such as William Kelsoe, George Mead, and Olcott as late as 1911 (see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 213; 258; 275).
- 73.
Indeed, Johnson’s library includes a number of books published by Theosophical Society members well after the 1885–86 controversy with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, such as Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1893), Mead’s Orpheus (1896) and The Chaldean Oracles (1908), as well as several of Mabel Collins’ works written between 1886 and 1906. Johnson also continued to subscribe to periodicals related to the Theosophical Society and related esoteric groups, like The Theosophical Review, The Brahmacharin, and The Metaphysical Magazine, almost until the time of his passing.
- 74.
See Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 20–22; 41–42.
- 75.
For Johnson’s attempts to secure a personal deck of Tarot cards through the British jeweler and esotericist Thomas Henry Pattinson, see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 343–347. As late as 1895, Johnson was still known in the US esoteric community as one of the few owners of Tarot cards (see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 480).
- 76.
An interest in Lévi’s ideas, including his Tarots, existed among Theosophists since the 1870s. See Julie Chajes, “Construction through Appropriation: Kabbalah in Blavatsky’s Early Works,” in Theosophical Appropriations: Esotericism, Kabbalah, and the Transformation of Traditions, eds. Julie Chajes and Boaz Huss (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2016), 47; Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 39–42. By the early 1880s, however, the Indian masters of Blavatsky and Olcott had decreed that Westerners were unfit for practical occultism, leading to a shift of focus in the Society’s goals and activities. See John P. Deveney, “The Two Theosophical Societies: Prolonged Life, Conditional Immortality and the Individualized Immortal Monad,” in Chajes and Huss, Theosophical Appropriations, 93–98. Regardless, Johnson’s continuing eagerness to learn everything he could about the Tarot can be gleaned from the letters he exchanged between 1884 and 1887 with prominent Theosophical Society and Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor members, such as Alfred Cooper-Oakley (see Cooper-Oakley to Johnson, April 19, 1887, unpublished letter), Jirah Buck (see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 113; 120), Doubleday (see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 158–162), and Charles Quetil (Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 361), as well as from his acquisition of Samuel Mathers’ The Tarot, which was published only in 1888.
- 77.
From its establishment in 1875 until the early 1880s the Theosophical Society focused on the occult work of develo** an immortal astral self, which could exist as a godling independently of one’s body. This practice included the use of magic mirrors for clairvoyance, and, to the extent that it was influenced by earlier esotericist Pascal Beverly Randolph, perhaps also the redeployment of sexual energy for occult purposes. See John P. Deveney, “Astral Projection or Liberation of the Double and the Work of the Early Theosophical Society,” Theosophical History Occasional Papers 6 (1997); Deveney, “The Two Theosophical Societies,” 93–114. From the late 1870s to about 1882 the Theosophical Society leaders also promoted the notion that astral travel could be attained through yoga. See Karl Baier, “Mesmeric Yoga and the Development of Meditation within the Theosophical Society,” Theosophical History 16, no. 3&4 (2012): 152–154.
For yoga in the early Theosophical Society and in the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, see Patrick Bowen, “‘The real pure Yog’: Yoga in the Early Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor,” in Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society, ed. Tim Rudbog and Erik Sand (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 143–164. The use of sex and magic mirrors to separate one’s astral double from the body and connect with celestial beings became central to the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor’s practical occultism, as attested in this order’s instructional manuscripts “Laws of Magic Mirrors” and “The Mysteries of Eros” (for which see Godwin, Chanel and Deveney, The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor , 71–74; 194–212; 213–278).
- 78.
See his correspondence with Pattinson (Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 346; 348) and with Ernest Sasseville (Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 447–448).
- 79.
See Bowen, “The real pure Yog,” 153.
- 80.
An unpublished letter from New York’s Vedanta Society (Cape to Johnson, January 14, 1906) proves that Johnson was seeking to obtain yoga instruction from a Swami (likely Swami Abhedananda) as late as 1906.
- 81.
On this point, see also see Whitaker, 1–3; 6; 8; 17–20.
- 82.
Johnson’s expectations about his children are suggested, on the one hand, by the middle names he gave to his sons (see above), and, on the other hand, by his concern over his daughter’s spiritual potential (for which see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 188).
- 83.
For early Theosophical Society doctrines about the soul and their similarities to the theurgy of Iamblichus and Proclus, see Bregman, “Synesius,” 311–316; Chajes, Recycled Lives, 114–116; 125–128. See also Deveney, “Astral Projection;” Deveney, “The Two Theosophical Societies.” Proclus’ theurgy involves, among other deeds (see Anne Sheppard, “Proclus’ attitude to theurgy,” Classical Quarterly 32 (1982): 212–224) invocations and the ritual use of divine names to obtain oracles, providing thereby a connection with Lévi’s practical Kabbalah. Such connection was acknowledged by the French occultist himself; see for example Lévi’s Paradoxes of the Highest Science (Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press, 1883), 101–110.
For resemblances between Platonic theurgy and South Asian yoga traditions, see Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul: The Neoplatonism of Iamblichus (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). As practiced in the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, yoga was intended to unite one’s soul with God, defined as “that perfect being which alone is manifested in its own light” (see Bowen and Johnson, Letters to the Sage, vol. 1, 420).
- 84.
The Neoplatonic authors Johnson was most appreciative of, such as Iamblichus, Damascius, and Proclus, identified spiritual union with the divine as the end of philosophy, and maintained that one’s soul could achieve this goal through theurgy.
- 85.
For Blavatsky’s shift toward “Oriental Kabbalah” and the counter-appropriation of Jewish and Christian Kabbalah as markers of Western occultism, see Marco Pasi, “The Oriental Kabala and the Parting of East and West,” in Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi, and Kocku von Stuckrad (eds.) Kabbalah and Modernity: Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 151–166.
- 86.
For this wishful augur, see Johnson’s salutatory to The Platonist II (1884), 1.
- 87.
Anderson, Platonism in the Midwest, 179–180; 183–184; 186. See also Bregman, “Thomas M. Johnson,” 102.
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Putzu, V. (2021). Heretical Orthodoxy: Eastern and Western Esotericism in Thomas Moore Johnson’s “Platonism”. In: Sedgwick, M., Piraino, F. (eds) Esoteric Transfers and Constructions. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61788-2_12
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