In Victorian London, between the founding of the Theosophical Society and that of the Golden Dawn, a young woman caught the attention of occultists, writers and reformers: Anna Kingsford. A physician at a time when very few women could be, a tireless activist and the author of mystical visions, she championed an esoteric interpretation of Christianity founded on Hermeticism and the ancient mysteries. She died at only forty-one, but her influence on the English esoteric revival was considerable.
An unconventional young woman
Annie Bonus was born in 1846 at Stratford, in Essex, the youngest child of a wealthy merchant. From childhood she wrote stories and poems and said she had dreams and visions. In 1867 she married her cousin Algernon Godfrey Kingsford, who later became an Anglican clergyman; her husband accepted, with a broad-mindedness unusual for the time, her independence and her studies.
In the 1870s Anna converted to Catholicism, drawn by its symbolism and by the figure of the Virgin, although her thought soon developed in a very personal direction. For a time she ran a women's magazine, campaigning for women's rights.
A physician in Paris
Since women in England faced enormous obstacles in medical studies, Kingsford enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. She graduated in 1880, among the first Englishwomen to obtain that degree, with a thesis on a vegetable diet for human beings. The thesis was later published in English under the title The Perfect Way in Diet.
During her studies she witnessed experiments on live animals that deeply shocked her. From then on the fight against vivisection became one of the great commitments of her life: she wrote articles, gave lectures and clashed with some of the leading French physiologists. For her, respect for animals was not only a moral question but a consequence of her spiritual vision, in which every living being shares in the divine life.
The collaboration with Edward Maitland
The intellectual companion of her whole adult life was the writer Edward Maitland, many years her senior, who accompanied her to Paris and became her collaborator and later her biographer. Together they gathered the visions and "illuminations" Kingsford often received in sleep, and worked them into a doctrinal system.
The main result was The Perfect Way, or the Finding of Christ (1882), a series of lectures in which Christianity is read as a symbolic language:
- Adam and Eve represent the spirit and the soul of the human being;
- the fall is the descent of the soul into matter and selfishness;
- Christ is not only a historical figure but the process of inner rebirth that every soul can accomplish;
- Mary symbolises the purified soul, capable of receiving the divine.
This interpretation explicitly drew on Hermeticism, Neoplatonism and the Greek mysteries, regarded as expressions of the same wisdom.
Theosophy and the Hermetic Society
In 1883 Kingsford was elected president of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society. Disagreements soon emerged, however: the Theosophical leadership, headed by Blavatsky and Olcott, insisted on the teachings of the Tibetan Mahatmas and on esoteric Buddhism, whereas Kingsford wanted to give pride of place to the Western and Christian tradition.
In 1884, with Maitland, she founded the Hermetic Society, devoted to the study of Western esotericism. Various figures of the London occultist scene lectured there, including MacGregor Mathers, who in 1887 dedicated The Kabbalah Unveiled to her and Maitland. Historians regard the Hermetic Society as one of the bridges between Theosophy and the birth of the Golden Dawn in 1888.
The last years
Kingsford's health, always fragile, worsened in the 1880s. She died in London in February 1888. After her death Maitland published the collection of her visions, Clothed with the Sun (1889), and a long biography, which remain the main sources for her thought.
A balanced assessment
Anna Kingsford was a figure of great courage: a woman who won a professional qualification in a hostile environment and firmly defended her ethical convictions. Her visions belong to personal experience and cannot be verified, and some contemporaries judged harshly her character and her tendency to see herself as the bearer of a special mission. But her attempt to rediscover a Western esoteric Christianity, distinct from orientalising Theosophy, played an important role in the history of British esotericism.
In short
- Anna Kingsford (1846-1888) took her medical degree in Paris in 1880 and fought against vivisection.
- With Edward Maitland she wrote The Perfect Way (1882), a symbolic and Hermetic reading of Christianity.
- She briefly presided over the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society, then founded the Hermetic Society.
- The Hermetic Society was a bridge between Theosophy and the birth of the Golden Dawn.
