McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, 2012
240 pp., $34.95 hardcover
Toronto has lots going on these days: theatre, music, restaurants, festivals. It’s the poster city for Canadian diversity. If all that isn’t enough to shake its “Toronto the good” reputation, then Gillian McCann gives us one more reason to revise any lingering assumptions with her careful history of the Toronto Theosophical Society (TTS).
The indomitable Helena Petrovna Blavatsky — Russian noblewoman, religious seeker, world traveller, and one-time spiritualist medium — brought theosophy to American shores in the 1870s. A chance meeting between one of her followers and a new Canadian immigrant, Albert Smythe, expanded the movement to Toronto.
Just what theosophy is remains hard to define. Blavatsky described it as an “archaic Wisdom-Religion” and “the esoteric doctrine once known in every ancient country having claims to civilization.” Drawing on Hinduism, Western “occultism,” and burgeoning enlightenment science, theoso-phists believed invisible seers had taught them eternal truths about the interaction between spirit and matter. Their complicated world view centred on evolutionary cycles of reincarnation said to lead all beings to return to the universal oversoul.
McCann never fully unpacks theosophist beliefs per se. What are clearly of central interest to her — and consequently what this book is about — are the movement’s political, social, and cultural implications. McCann weaves together the stories of the TTS’s intellectual elite, including feminist Flora MacDonald Denison, artists Lawren Harris and Arthur Lismer, as well as politicians and thinkers. She shows how theosophy opened up to new ways of conceiving the world beyond the “goose-steppers … in religion, medicine, society, state or what you will,” as Harris put it.
Theosophy led adherents in often radical directions: accepting interracial marriage, advocating a utopian socialist ideal, experimenting with the first “Hindoo” cremations, or bringing (in)famous anarchist Emma Goldman to Canada. While McCann clearly admires these commitments, she does not shy away from TTS hypocrisy. Its members were almost exclusively of the Anglo social elite who fetishized “oriental” and Indian culture but distanced themselves from actual Indian immigrants and the racist implications of Canadian policies or British imperialism. They guarded their own social position, often unthinkingly, even while advocating radical equality. They brought Hindu concepts to North America yet moulded them to suit Protestant proclivities.
More broadly, McCann describes the TTS as a microcosm of the “classic Canadian triangle”: Theosophy was an import from the U.S. with a strong British (and later international) component. As the English and American branches of the society vied for control, the Toronto chapter, under Smythe’s long-term leadership, worked to forge a separate Canadian identity — an early example, according to McCann, of the tightrope Canada learned to walk as the twentieth century progressed.
This book is fundamentally about the advent of this social and political “New Age,” but one gets the sense that McCann did mean for the title to encompass the advent of post-1960s spiritual quests. She ends by comparing TTS members to today’s New Age adherents, “with their cyber shamans and power yoga,” whom she dismisses as apolitical and individualistic. For my taste, this quick conclusion sounds uncomfortably like the comment she recalls one of her professors making about theosophy itself: “Why would you want to do research on a bunch of Rosedale matrons dabbling in exotica?” The implications regarding gender of these sorts of conclusions, especially when it comes to religions outside the “norm,” still need our careful attention.
This bee in my bonnet aside, Vanguard of the New Age is an engaging read about the formation of radical social and political circles in turn-of-the-century Toronto, as well as how Anglo-Canadian intellectuals formed international links and engaged in incipient nation building. Kudos to McCann for unearthing a forgotten piece of Canadian history that enlivens our understanding of our country’s diverse intellectual foundations.
— Hillary Kaell (Read bio)
Hillary Kaell is an assistant professor of religion at Concordia University. Her first book, Where Jesus Walked: Contemporary American Holy Land Pilgrimage, is under contract with New York University Press.