Thomas Moore Johnson was many things. Besides working as an attorney and serving in several civic positions in his hometown of Osceola, Missouri, he was also an early leading figure in American Theosophy and in the occult group known as the H.B. of L. (Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor). It was these connections that 6 years ago led me to track down his descendants to see if they still possessed his unpublished correspondence. It turned out that they did, and soon I was poring over hundreds of pages of fragile missives that had been sent to the lawyer. Those letters were crucial for understanding the early development (1870s-1880s) of organized esotericism in America generally, and in St. Louis in particular.
I had become interested in Johnson after learning that the famous early white American Muslim convert, Alexander Russell Webb, had been in the same Theosophical lodge at that time. Johnson's letters, I discovered, not only shed a great deal of light on Webb's personal religious transformation, but they also put American esotericism in a very new perspective, revealing previously unknown ties to Rosicrucians, New Thought, yoga, and Sufism, and showing the struggles and battles of those who strove to plant non-Christian religious identities within the American mainstream. The letters were so important that, after writing my book on early white American Muslim converts, I teamed up with K. Paul Johnson to edit several of Johnson's esotericist letters, which were published in 2016 under the title Letters to the Sage, Volume One.
Johnson's correspondence, however, includes a great deal of material that has nothing to do with esotericism. Indeed, the majority of his non-family letters came from individuals whose primary interest was philosophy--Johnson's first intellectual love. Johnson was a committed Platonist, having converted in the early 1870s through the writings of the 18th c. British Platonist Thomas Taylor. It was Platonism that he saw Theosophy and the Hermetic Brotherhood as manifestations of, and it was in fact Platonism that first put him in touch with Madame Blavatsky's movement.
The connection came through Alexander Wilder, a polymath whose recent edition of translations of Thomas Taylor inspired Johnson to reach out to him in early 1876. Timing is sometimes everything, and within a year Wilder was working as the editor of Blavatsky's famous Isis Unveiled, a project through which he became an associate of Theosophy's founders in New York. This was Johnson's initial connection with esotericism, an area of intellectual life that would hold much of his attention for the next decade.
Despite these important connections, however, Wilder's relationship with Johnson was based not around Theosophy, which Wilder did not care for all that much, but on Platonism. Wilder was fascinated by the ancient and late antique Greek philosophers--he was even friendly with the Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott and other members of the Concord School--so he was happy to engage with the energetic young Platonist. Over the years, in fact, he encouraged Johnson to start and then continue both a Platonism-focused magazine and translations of Neoplatonic works. Through these efforts, Johnson solidified himself as a key figure in the history of the American study of Plato and his Greek interpreters.
But Wilder was also an important figure in his on right. His interests were broad (he was a sometime politician and an "eclectic" physician), and his diverse ties to American thinkers and liberal movements made him an important, if generally overlooked, influencer in the development of multiple intellectual currents. Wilder published prodigiously--numerous articles of his have in fact been collected and re-published in multiple volumes over the last several years. The letters from him to Johnson, which are now being released in Letters to the Sage, Volume Two, therefore provide a detailed glimpse into the mental workings and social life of key behind-the-scenes players in American philosophy.
For more on Wilder, Volume Two, and continuing developments in the research of the history of American esotericism, see K. Paul Johnson's blog, History of the Adepts.
No comments:
Post a Comment