Edward Maitland

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Edward Maitland was a man who arrived at his life’s work late, sideways, and through another person’s eyes. By the time the books that carry his name appeared he was past fifty, a widower, a returned gold-prospector and failed novelist who had spent his middle years writing fiction nobody now reads. What he became instead was a kind of instrument: the recording, ordering, arguing intelligence that turned the trance-visions of a much younger woman into a system, a library, and a religion. He called it the New Gospel of Interpretation. The woman was Anna Kingsford, and almost everything posterity knows about her, it knows because Maitland wrote it down.

He was born at Ipswich on 27 October 1824, into a strict evangelical clerical household — his father, Charles David Maitland, was a well-known Brighton preacher of the low-church kind. Admitted a pensioner at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in April 1843, he took his degree in 1847 and was intended, as the eldest son so often was, for holy orders. He could not take them. The sticking point was not the surplice but the creed: he found he could not subscribe to the doctrines a clergyman was required to affirm, and the refusal cost him the career his family had laid out. What he did instead was leave. In 1849 he sailed for California as one of the band of forty-niners, and the single year of absence he had asked for stretched into nine. He prospected on the Pacific shore, drifted to New South Wales, and there held office as a commissioner of crown lands on the colonial frontier. He married Esther Charlotte Bradley in 1855 and was widowed within roughly a year, left with a son. He came home to England at the end of 1857 with the makings of a writer and very little else.

The novels and the meeting

The fiction came first and is the part of his life he later tried to erase. The Pilgrim and the Shrine (1867), issued under the name Herbert Ainslie, was a thinly veiled autobiography — the West Indies, the gold rush, the long detour through doubt — and was followed by The Higher Law (1869) and the speculative By and By: An Historical Romance of the Future (1873), a utopia set centuries ahead and one of the curiosities of early science fiction. The novels are confessional, anti-dogmatic, restless; they are the record of a man working his way out of his father’s religion without yet finding anything to put in its place. Later Maitland bought up and destroyed the remaining stock of The Pilgrim and the Shrine, meaning to fold its material into the biography he eventually wrote of Kingsford — so that even his own early life survives largely as he chose to recast it.

It was By and By that brought him to Anna Kingsford’s notice. The two became acquainted in 1873; in early 1874 he visited her at Atcham, the Shropshire vicarage of her husband, the Anglican clergyman Algernon Kingsford. She was a generation younger — born 1846 — a physician in the making and a Roman Catholic convert who experienced what she called illuminations: waking visions, lucid dreams, and trance-states in which she held that she received instruction from angelic intelligences and recovered the memory of former lives. She insisted these came as they had come to Proclus and Iamblichus, by illumination and not by trained mediumship. With her husband’s consent, Maitland became her constant companion and collaborator, accompanying her to Paris while she took her medical degree, sharing her war on materialism and on vivisection. Theirs was a platonic partnership of unusual intensity that lasted from 1874 until her death in 1888 — and within it the division of labor was clear and, for understanding Maitland, decisive. She received; he recorded. She saw; he interpreted, systematized, cross-questioned, and set in order. From 1876 he reported developing a sensitiveness of his own, but the essential pattern held: the visionary and the scribe.

The Perfect Way and the rendering of the Hermetica

Their first joint book, The Keys of the Creeds (1875), appeared anonymously. The work that made them was The Perfect Way; or, the Finding of Christ (1882), based on a course of lectures and standing as the central statement of the New Gospel of Interpretation. Its argument was that Christianity is an esoteric science of the soul — that its dogmas are not records of events in Judaea but veiled accounts of an inner process of regeneration, and that Christ names not solely one historical man but a stage of attainment open to anyone who finds it within. To this they joined a cosmology drawn from Hermes Trismegistus and the late-antique Platonists, the doctrine of reincarnation and the soul’s pre-existence, an immanent and near-pantheist sense of divinity distributed through all things, and a pronounced current of the divine feminine — the soul figured as feminine, Sophia and the world-soul restored to the godhead the churches had made wholly male. The ethics were not an appendix to this but its expression: a strict vegetarianism and an absolute repudiation of vivisection, pressed by Kingsford with a ferocity that defined her public life, held to be spiritual imperatives and not merely humane preferences.

In 1885 came the companion volume that anchors Maitland most directly to the hermetic line: The Virgin of the World, a rendering into English of treatises of Hermes Trismegistus — the dialogues and fragments of the Corpus Hermeticum and its satellites, including the Kore Kosmou from which the volume takes its name — prepared with Kingsford and leaning in part on the French scholarship of Louis Ménard. For an English readership that had begun to look past the churches toward older roots, it put the Hermetica into circulation as living scripture rather than antiquarian curiosity, and it carried the pair’s interpretive frame with it: the gnosis of Egypt and Alexandria read as one continuous revelation with the inner Christianity of The Perfect Way.

Theosophy, the break, and the Hermetic Society

The Perfect Way drew the attention of Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, who recognized in it matter they had thought reserved to Eastern adepts. In January 1883 Kingsford was elected president of the London Lodge of the Theosophical Society, with Maitland as vice-president. The arrangement did not hold. Kingsford and Maitland were committed to a Western, Christian-Hermetic reading of the perennial wisdom — the old gnosis recovered through Egypt, Greece, and the symbolism of the gospels — while the faction around Alfred Percy Sinnett pressed the Indian, esoteric-Buddhist line of the Mahatma letters. When Olcott visited London in 1884 he found the two tendencies irreconcilable and suggested Kingsford form a body of her own. The Hermetic Society was inaugurated on 9 May 1884, Kingsford as president and Maitland as vice-president; Olcott himself attended the first meeting and spoke cordially. The split was doctrinal more than personal — a quarrel over whether the wisdom was best read through the Neoplatonism of the Mediterranean world or through the trans-Himalayan East — and it placed Maitland and Kingsford at a permanent, deliberate angle to the Theosophy from which they had come.

The Hermetic Society lived only a few years, but its lecture room was a seedbed. Among those who spoke or listened there were S. L. MacGregor Mathers and William Wynn Westcott, who in 1887–1888 founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; Mathers dedicated his Kabbalah Unveiled (1887) to the authors of The Perfect Way, and the Golden Dawn’s admission of women on equal terms with men is often traced to Kingsford’s example. The Western, Christian-tinged esotericism that Maitland helped articulate against the Eastward drift of Theosophy thus passed, through that short-lived society, into the current that would dominate English esotericism for a generation.

Keeper of the legacy

Kingsford’s health, never strong, broke after she was caught in torrential rain in Paris in November 1886; pneumonia gave way to pulmonary tuberculosis, and she died on 22 February 1888, aged forty-one. From that point Maitland’s work was the work of a custodian. He edited and issued the visionary material she had left: Dreams and Dream-Stories (1888) and Clothed with the Sun (1889), the latter gathering her illuminations. In November 1891 he founded the Esoteric Christian Union to carry the teaching forward as an organized current, publishing The New Gospel of Interpretation (1892) as its manifesto. And he labored over his magnum opus, the two-volume Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary, and Work (1896) — at once biography, apologia, and the fullest exposition of their shared system, drawing heavily on the autobiography he had once meant for his own novels.

The reach of the Esoteric Christian Union ran farther than its small membership suggests. In the 1890s a young Indian lawyer in South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi, served as the Union’s local agent, selling Kingsford’s and Maitland’s mystical books — The Perfect Way, Clothed with the Sun, The New Gospel of Interpretation — and reading Kingsford’s The Perfect Way in Diet with gratitude. The vegetarian and inward-Christian strain that Maitland helped formulate thus touched, at a distance, one of the lives that would most shape the coming century.

The authorship question

Here the entry must hold two things at once, because the historical record requires it. Maitland was Kingsford’s amanuensis, editor, interpreter, and posthumous biographer — and after he completed the 1896 Life he burned the diaries and letters she had bequeathed to him. The surviving documentary Kingsford is therefore very substantially Maitland’s construction. One reading takes the system as essentially her visionary content, with Maitland the faithful scribe who only ordered and clarified what she received. Another holds that his framing, his theological elaboration, and above all his editorial selection shaped the system decisively — that the New Gospel of Interpretation is as much the work of the recorder as of the seer. The major modern biography, Alan Pert’s Red Cactus (2006), goes further and charges Maitland with misrepresenting her, even besmirching her, in the very book that preserves her. The contest cannot be settled from the surviving evidence, because the man who shaped the evidence is the man whose role is in question; it sits, permanently, inside everything attributed to her.

One episode shows how carefully that mediation must be handled. Kingsford came to believe that she could kill vivisecting physiologists by concentrated psychic will, and a diary entry preserved in Maitland’s Life records her conviction, after the death of the physiologist Paul Bert in 1886, that she had killed him as she believed she had killed Claude Bernard, and that she would kill Pasteur after him — a power she regarded, in the entry, as a magnificent instrument of justice against tyrants. This is reported here as her sincere conviction and as a documented passage in Maitland’s biography, and as nothing more: Bernard had been chronically ill for years and Bert died of dysentery in Hanoi. The episode belongs to her absolute moral horror of vivisection and to the period’s occult theories of the will, and it reaches us, like the rest of her interior life, through Maitland’s hand.

Sources and scholarship {#research}

The indispensable primary source is also the most partisan: Maitland’s Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary, and Work, 2 vols. (London: George Redway, 1896), the principal record of both the woman and the system, written by the man who curated and then destroyed its underlying papers. His shorter memoir, The Story of Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland and of the New Gospel of Interpretation, is freely readable through the Online Books Page listing of Maitland’s works, which aggregates his texts across digital libraries. The 1882 Perfect Way and the 1885 Virgin of the World are the two doctrinal anchors; the latter is held in the project’s own library. For Maitland’s earlier life as a novelist, the fullest authoritative summary remains the Dictionary of National Biography notice in its 1901 supplement, and the science-fiction reception of his utopia By and By is treated in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia entry on Maitland and in the DePauw Science Fiction Studies discussion, “On and From By and By”.

The standard modern scholarship treats Kingsford and Maitland as a significant current of the British occult revival. Alex Owen’s The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), reviewed in detail by Peter Stansky for H-Albion, situates them within the wider entanglement of occultism and modern culture. Joy Dixon’s Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) reads their divine-feminine current as part of the larger meeting of esoteric spirituality with English feminism. Alan Pert’s Red Cactus: The Life of Anna Kingsford (Sydney: Books & Writers, 2006) is the major modern biography and the most pointed reassessment of Maitland’s role as editor and mythmaker. The pair’s place in the history of organized vegetarianism and anti-vivisection is treated in Hilda Kean’s Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (1998), and their feed into the Golden Dawn milieu in the work of R. A. Gilbert. For the transmission to Gandhi, Kathryn Tidrick’s Gandhi: A Political and Spiritual Life (2006) traces the Esoteric Christian Union’s influence on his early spirituality.

He died at Tonbridge, in Kent, on 2 October 1897, having in his last months lost the power of speech. His name was by then almost wholly bound to hers.

→ In the library: Kingsford & Maitland — The Virgin of the World (1885)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Theosophy · Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Corpus Hermeticum · Theosophical Society · Helena Blavatsky · Henry Steel Olcott · Reincarnation · Esotericism · Mahatma Gandhi · Christianity