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121 Chapter Five Occult Body Politics In 1912 James Ingall Wedgwood, then general secretary of the TS in England and editor of The Vāhan, reminded his readers that HPB had predicted that theosophy would pass through three periods of growth: the physical, the intellectual, and the spiritual. “Many of us think,” he went on, “that the epoch of spiritual predominance commenced when Mrs. Besant was elected to the Presidency, and that this period has been marked by a fuller flow of spiritual life throughout the Society.” “Fresh channels of kindred work” had appeared, which were the material evidence of this new spiritual life.1 What I have described as a domestication of the occult is here inserted in another narrative: the evolution of the TS from its beginnings in the physical phenomena that had intrigued the psychical researchers; through the intellectual phase, which had its heyday under Olcott; to the full flowering of the spiritual under Annie Besant. Theosophy’s spiritual phase was not, however, a quietist withdrawal from the world; it included far-reaching political initiatives intended to bring the material realities of the “physical plane” into harmony with the Cosmic Plan. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an important utopian element within the British left argued that the moral transformation of the individual was central to social transformation.2 As Terry Eagleton reminds us, these were the days of decadence as well as the Dock Strike, and of spiritualism as well as syndicalism, in which “the same figures can be found demonstrating for the unemployed and dabbling in occultism.”3 These men and women saw no conflict between the transformation of subjectivity and the transformation of the material world through revolutionary change. The relative invisibility of the spiritual elements of this radical political culture in historical accounts of this period is a legacy of struggles that have their origins in just these years. In the 1880s the socialist movement was actually many movements combined: “Marxism, radical Christianity, anti-industrialism, secularism, ethical Socialism, Fabian and reformist Socialism” all jostled for position.4 Eventually three main currents emerged, each with 122 political alchemies its own organization, style, and strategy: Social Democracy, Fabianism, and ethical socialism (the chief vehicle of which was to be the Independent Labour Party). By about 1910 the more scientific versions of socialism —the Marxism adopted by Hyndman and the Social Democratic Federation, and the technocratic-reformism of the Fabians—had triumphed , and ethical socialism retired from the field in disarray.5 The historical success of these more scientific socialisms has shaped the historiography of socialism itself. As Mark Bevir points out, the orthodox account implies that “a religious society characterized by primitive rebellions naturally evolves into a secular one characterized by class conflict.” Bevir, in contrast, reads “the socialism of the 1890s against orthodox assumptions about modernization and secularization.” He traces the contours of a new theology of “immanentism,” which underpinned the rejection of classical liberalism and made possible a distinctively new form of collectivism in both the New Liberalism and the socialist revival.6 These theological and intellectual shifts cannot perhaps bear all the weight Bevir assigns to them; changing political contexts produced radically different understandings of these ideas, which could be found not only among collectivists but also among their most vociferous opponents . But immanentism did provide some socialists with important political resources. In immanentist theology the divine was represented not as a transcendent Being, separate from creation, but as immanent in an evolving material world. William Jupp, one of the founding members of the socialist Fellowship of the New Life in the 1880s, put it this way: for many of his generation, religion could be summed up as “an impassioned sense of the Unity and Order of the world and of our own personal relation thereto; an emotional apprehension of the Universal Life in which all individual lives are included and by which they are sustained; the communion of the human spirit with the Unseen and Eternal; faith in God as the Principle of Unity.”7 We know relatively little about the relationship between feminist politics and this immanentist impulse, and even less about the ways in which a feminist investment in this worldview might have affected women’s relationship to the socialist movement. There are, however, reasons to believe that something like Jupp’s vision of the “Universal Life” and “God as the Principle of Unity” also played an important role in feminist culture. Margaret...

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