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67 Chapter Three “A Deficiency of the Male Element” Gendering Spiritual Experience In the late nineteenth century the Theosophical Society, and English occultism as a whole, was a man’s world. In the twentieth century esoteric religion was redefined as a paradigmatically feminine experience. Women became emblematic of a personal, emotional, and subjective religiosity, and spirituality was increasingly represented as an essentially feminine enterprise. These associations were popularized and given academic respectability in Jungian psychology. The Jungian psychologist Esther Harding, following Jung himself, elaborated this point in Woman’s Mysteries, first published in 1935. “Contact with the inner or spiritual world,” Harding argued, “is governed not by masculine but by feminine laws.” Her definition of the spiritual as personal, subjective, a-rational, and relational is repeatedly tied back to her understanding of the feminine.1 One corollary to the claim that religion was the special province of women was that it had therefore become insignificant. As Jeffrey Cox puts it, “Church was for women, and there was a general assumption, which historians have not entirely avoided, that women were unimportant , religion was for women, and religion was therefore unimportant.”2 The supposed feminization of religion also fitted neatly with a renewed emphasis on the private, personal, and subjective character of religious experience. William James’s famous definition of religion as “the feelings , acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine” reflected this emphasis.3 Since women were popularly believed to be associated with feeling rather than reason, and with the private rather than the public sphere, religion was also understood as primarily experiential and personal. The perceived feminization of religion is therefore a crucial component of the secularization thesis. Historians have now come to recognize that the most simplistic versions of this thesis can only be sustained by a blatant disregard for the evidence .4 The current reevaluation of the process of secularization allows 68 domesticating the occult us to reconsider the links between the private, the spiritual, and the feminine. These links were actually historical rather than natural phenomena. The history of the Theosophical Society in England provides an excellent opportunity to trace the emergence of these links. After Annie Besant became president of the TS in 1907, the English Section of the society began to be dominated by women, and the kinds of spiritual activity that were celebrated within the TS were characterized, by both critics and supporters, as distinctively feminine. Both of these shifts were a significant departure from earlier patterns within the Theosophical Society. When a register of members was first compiled in 1890 the society’s membership was largely male; as early as 1895, however, almost half of new members were female. Between 1900 and 1910 nearly two-thirds of new members were women. After 1910 the fraction climbed even higher, and from 1915 to 1925 between two-thirds and three-quarters of new recruits were women.5 Simultaneously there was a new emphasis on emotion and devotion rather than study, on personal relationships rather than abstract principles, and on hierarchy and loyalty rather than individual autonomy. Subjective and interior experiences were valued in new ways, and many of these experiences took place in the rigorously private (in the sense of secret or hidden) context of the Esoteric Section. These changes were dramatic enough that some critics began to refer to Besant’s “neo-theosophy.”6 Less clear is the relationship between the literal feminization of the Theosophical Society and the emergence of a more feminine (or even feminist) spiritual practice. In her groundbreaking study of alternative religion in America, Mary Farrell Bednarowski emphasizes the doctrinal and structural elements that drew women to movements like theosophy , including the rejection of an anthropomorphic God and of a traditional, male-dominated, ordained priesthood.7 More recent studies attempt to locate these features in their specific historical contexts.8 An exploration of the specific historical context in which women came to dominate the TS in England reveals a surprising result: while the features that Bednarowski identified were characteristic of theosophy in its first fifty years, many of them were least evident at precisely those moments when women dominated the society. The relationship between women, the feminine, and feminism within the TS in England was not at all straightforward. The transformation of theosophy was not an inevitable result of the increasing numbers...

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