Theosophical Writers in Weird Tales

I quoted the other day from "The Call of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft (1926, 1928). That quote is the entire first paragraph of Lovecraft's story. Here is the entire second:

     Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things--in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

(In other words, loosely, Had I But Known . . . )

I don't know how much Lovecraft knew about Theosophy or how much he might have believed in any of it. Maybe he just referred to Theosophy as a way of setting off echoes in the mind of the reader, who would have at least heard of that belief system, or as a way of beginning to build mood by referring to "the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle" necessary in his own story. I don't think I would call Lovecraft a Theosophical writer, though. Instead, he seems to have used the objects he found around him in his new assemblage, like a Modernist poet, novelist, or artist. Despite all of his influences, Lovecraft seems to have been mostly his own writer. That's one of the reasons, I think, that he still holds up and is still significant. Imitators, samplers, and creators of pastiches don't usually last very well. Original thinkers and writers more often do.

There were Theosophical writers in Weird Tales, though, and others who were associated in one way or another with the magazine. Without knowing it, I suspect, Weird Tales at its founding tapped into more than one vein of spiritualism, supernaturalism, occultism, esotericism, and so on in America. Some readers and writers were no doubt hardheaded--the typical, practical, down-to-earth American. Others seem to have been primed and ready for a magazine like Weird Tales. Here at last was a mainstream (if that's not too big of a word for it) publication that probed and treated and was seemingly sympathetic to their interests, in ghosts, demons, reincarnation, psychic phenomena, etc., including other worlds that touch our own. I'll have a little more to say about these things in the next part of what has turned into a series.

So who were the Theosophical writers in Weird Tales and associated with Weird Tales? Well, so far, I have these (click on their names for links):

• Bernice Banning (1885-1954)
• William Levington Comfort (1878-1932), mentor to and father-in-law of Paul Annixter (1894-1985)
• Guy Endore (1901-1970), author of The Werewolf of Paris (1933)
• Mrs. Edgar Saltus (1883-1960)
• Wilma Dorothy Vermilyea (1915-1995), aka Millen Cooke

These authors were not all quite of the same generation, but they're close. I suppose that there are still Theosophists in the world, but perhaps nothing like there were in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like Bellamyites and subscribers to Georgism, they seem to have fallen by the wayside. I suspect the same thing will happen one day to believers in Dianetics and Scientology. The fate of believers in Flying Saucers-as-like-angels-from-on-high seems less certain. I think, though, that if an author of today were to begin his story with a reference to Theosophy, he would not be taken very seriously by his readers. Any such reference would have to be intended as ironic or satirical or historical. Theosophy is, after all, a belief for another time not our own.

Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), co-founder and theorist of Theosophy. From the Scranton Republican, October 17, 1888, page 1. By coincidence to events of today, Madame Blavatsky was born in what is now Ukraine. I should add that the name Ukraine is supposed to mean "borderland." I guess that means that Theosophy is literally from the borderlands.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley