Thursday, January 7, 2010

Theosophical History: XIV:1-2


A new issue of Theosophical History is out. It is a double issue for January-April 2008. This is not a misprint; that is the date it bears. James Santucci, the editor, states that a heavy teaching assignment plus other events have led to its delay. Though bearing a 2008 date it contains an obituary of Jean Overton Fuller who died on April 8, 2009, giving the journal an aura of horrible prescience. Miss Fuller gave the early issues of Theosophical History a literary bent. Rather than be limited by historical fact, her writings on various theosophists were always more in the area of extended opinion pieces. Leslie Price contributes a short notice of the lapses in a 2008 biography of the British scientist, Sir William Crookes, and Dr. Santucci reviews a Ph.D. dissertation on the development of theosophical oriented groups in Denmark at the end of the twentieth century. The rest of the issue—35 pages—contains a long critique of Jean Overton Fuller’s contention, in her biography of Krishnamurti, that a South Indian adept mentioned by Blavatsky as Narayan, etc., was the same person as a blind yogi named Nargaratnaswami who Ernest Wood met in the Madras Presidency and whom he writes about in his 1936 autobiography, Is this Theosophy. The writer, Govert Schuller, has assembled a mass of evidence to match his theory. If one is interested in following this arcane matter, fine, if not, it makes a very singular double issue.
For $16.00 it can be ordered here.

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