Alexander Wilder

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In the medicine of Alexander Wilder’s youth the doctor arrived with a lancet and a bottle of calomel. The standard of care — the “heroic” treatment of the mid-nineteenth-century American practice — was to bleed the patient, dose him with mercury until the gums ran, and add antimony to provoke vomiting; the violence of the cure was taken as a measure of its seriousness. Against this Wilder set himself early. By 1848 he had helped found a county botanical medical society in upstate New York, and the rest of his clinical life ran inside the reform movement that called itself eclectic medicine — a current that rejected the mineral poisons and the bleeding bowl in favor of botanic remedies and a gentler hand. He rose to its institutional summit: president of the Eclectic Medical Society of the State of New York from 1869, professor of physiology in the Eclectic Medical College of the City of New York from 1873 to 1877, professor of psychology in the United States Medical College from 1878 until that institution was dissolved by court order in 1883, and for nearly two decades the secretary of the National Eclectic Medical Association, editing the annual Transactions through which the movement spoke to itself. In 1901, at the Association’s request, he wrote a nine-hundred-page History of Medicine tracing the healing art from antiquity to the sects of his own day.

The word eclectic in that medical name was no accident, and to follow it is to find the second Wilder underneath the first. He had been born on May 14, 1823, in Verona, in Oneida County, New York, raised on his father’s farm, and set to teaching a country school at fifteen. There was no college behind him. What learning he had he took himself, teaching himself Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and through them reaching the texts that became the great passion of his life. The medical school he led called itself eclectic in conscious echo of the Eclectic or Alexandrian school of late antiquity — the Platonist movement that gathered in Alexandria around Ammonius Saccas and ran through Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus. For Wilder the two eclecticisms were one gesture: the refusal to be bound to a single school, the conviction that truth is gathered from many sources and reconciled, not received whole from one authority.

The self-taught Platonist

Wilder belonged to the small line of nineteenth-century Americans who kept Platonism and Neoplatonism in circulation before the occult revival made such matters fashionable — the heirs, on this side of the Atlantic, of the English Platonist Thomas Taylor, whose translations of Plato and the later schools had carried the tradition through a hostile century. In 1869 Wilder published New Platonism and Alchemy: A Sketch of the Doctrines and Principal Teachers of the Eclectic or Alexandrian School, first issued in the eclectic society’s own Transactions and then separately at Albany. It reads the Alexandrian movement as Ammonius’s attempt to reconcile the warring philosophies of the world into a single primeval wisdom — what Wilder, borrowing the philosophers’ own self-description, called the work of the Philaletheians, the lovers of truth. He treated the mystery religions, the doctrine of the soul, and theurgy not as curiosities of a dead world but as a coherent system that had once held the educated mind of the Mediterranean, and he carried that conviction into the alchemists of the later Middle Ages, in whom he saw the same interior doctrine working under a chemical disguise.

His scholarship was bound up with the journal The Platonist, which his friend Thomas Moore Johnson edited from Missouri and to which Wilder was a principal contributor. There he published a serialized English version of Iamblichus’s treatise on the Egyptian mysteries — the work commonly titled Iamblichus on the Mysteries — in 1884, and there the Taylor inheritance was kept alive in reprint. In 1891 he saw Thomas Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries through a new edition with his own annotations, an act of editorial piety toward the man he regarded as his English predecessor. His essays returned again and again to the philosophy he found running beneath the surface of the older religions — the notion that the rites of Eleusis, the Egyptian sanctuaries, and the doctrines the Greeks ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus were not separate superstitions but local refractions of one wisdom. This was the perennialist instinct in its American form, learned and unhurried, decades before it acquired a movement.

Wilder earned his living, meanwhile, with the pen as much as the lancet. He had been an assistant editor on the Syracuse Star in the early 1850s, and from 1857 he spent thirteen years on the editorial staff of the New York Evening Post — the kind of newspaper apprenticeship that taught a man to cut, order, and clarify other people’s prose. That craft, more than any doctrine, is what would attach his name to the most famous book he never wrote.

New York, 1875, and the Theosophical Society

The eclectic physician who read Iamblichus in the original was exactly the sort of man drawn into the circle forming in New York in the autumn of 1875, when Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, and a small company of others founded the Theosophical Society to pursue the study of the ancient wisdom and the hidden laws of nature. Wilder was among the early members — enrolled on the Society’s books in its first season — and he served for a time as one of its vice-presidents under the presidency of Abner Doubleday. He was never a devotee. The doctrines of Theosophy — the Masters, the cosmic root-races, the borrowed Sanskrit machinery that the second generation would elaborate — left him cool. What he shared with the founders was the older enthusiasm, the Alexandrian one: the belief that the philosophies of antiquity held a living wisdom rather than a museum of dead opinion. He came to the Society as a scholar of the same sources, not as a believer in its revelation, and that distance would mark everything he did for it.

His friendship with Blavatsky and Olcott put him, too, on the edge of the wider American spiritualist ferment out of which the Society partly grew — the séance rooms and the appetite for empirical proof of survival that the early Theosophists shared with their spiritualist neighbors even as they reached past them toward an older metaphysics. Wilder, the eclectic and the Platonist, moved through that world as a man of orthodox-enough public standing whose private library pointed somewhere stranger.

The shaping of Isis Unveiled

When Blavatsky’s first major book came to press in 1877, it arrived on the publisher’s desk as a vast and unruly manuscript. J. W. Bouton, the New York publisher who took it on, engaged Wilder — already known to him as a Platonist and a practiced editor — to read the work, judge it, and bring it into publishable shape. Wilder recommended it for publication, then was given the manuscript with instruction to abridge it as he saw fit. He cut it considerably. He corrected the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew that ran through Blavatsky’s pages and that her own command of the classical languages could not be trusted to keep straight. He compiled the index. And he drafted most of the long opening section, “Before the Veil,” which sets out the book’s philosophical frame — credited only in footnotes, at his own request, so that the work would stand unambiguously as Blavatsky’s. Henry Steel Olcott, for his part, proofread every page. The two volumes, issued in September 1877 by Bouton under the title Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, sold their first printing within ten days.

Wilder’s own account of the work, set down near the end of his life in the 1908 essay How Isis Unveiled Was Written, is the candid testimony of a craftsman, not a disciple. The abridgment, he recalled, had been “an undesirable task, but I did it with scrupulous regard to the interest of the publisher, and to what I esteemed to be just to the author”. When Blavatsky later proposed to revise the book and asked him to mark its faults freely, he pointed out plainly what he considered errors of style and pressed on her the importance of naming her sources — the very documentation whose absence later critics, beginning with William Emmette Coleman’s 1895 catalog of unattributed borrowings, would make the central charge against the book. Wilder admired Blavatsky’s range and force; he did not pretend the manuscript had reached him in finished condition, and his reservations are on the record in his own hand. The episode left him a permanent fixture in every account of Theosophy’s origins — less as a believer in its doctrines than as the scholar whose hand lies on the text that thousands of readers first encountered.

Scholarship and the record

Wilder’s New Platonism and Alchemy (1869) survives in its original form and is hosted in full by the Theosophical University Press at theosociety.org, the cleanest reading text of the work that fixed his reputation as an American Platonist. His History of Medicine (1901) remains the standard internal history of the eclectic movement and a useful source on the controversy over heroic treatment. The first edition of Isis Unveiled he helped shape is hosted here in the Library; the underlying 1877 Bouton text is public domain and its bibliography has been worked out in detail — Wilder’s contribution to the index, the classical apparatus, and “Before the Veil” is now a settled point of the book’s editorial history rather than a matter of family tradition. For the larger frame, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008) places Wilder within the nineteenth-century convergence of Platonism, spiritualism, and the comparative study of religion; Joscelyn Godwin’s The Theosophical Enlightenment (SUNY Press, 1994) maps the American Platonist milieu — Wilder, Thomas Moore Johnson, the readership of The Platonist — out of which the Theosophical Society partly drew its early membership. The source-critical literature on Isis Unveiled, from Coleman forward, treats Wilder’s editorial role as one of the few firmly documented facts in a book otherwise dense with disputed attribution.

His standing is best described in proportion. He was not a system-builder or the founder of a movement, and his philosophical writing has not held a lasting place in the academic study of Platonism, which long ago moved past the genial perennialism of Taylor and his American heirs. What he represents is something more characteristic of his moment: the learned amateur, fluent in the classical sources, who treated the ancient philosophies as living wisdom rather than dead antiquity, and who lent that fluency to the new spiritual currents forming around him — the same bridging function that carried Theosophical teaching to a wider public in the books of A. P. Sinnett a few years later. He died on September 18, 1908, in Newark, New Jersey, an old eclectic and an old Platonist to the end, remembered more for the books he shaped than for those he wrote.

→ In the library: Blavatsky — Isis Unveiled (1877), edited by Wilder

→ Related: Theosophy · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Helena Blavatsky · Theosophical Society · Platonism · Alexandria · Henry Steel Olcott · Thomas Taylor · Iamblichus · Proclus · Spiritualism · Mystery Religions · A P Sinnett · Eclecticism