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This chapter focuses on a cluster of institutions, in both France and the Germanic territories, that produced and disseminated knowledge outside the confines of university or church: academies, learned societies, publishing houses, networks of savants, naturalists, collectors, travellers, and antiquarians. What they had in common, from the point of view of curiosity, is that they introduced two great semantic changes into it. First, they reshaped curiosity into something that was usually good, in opposition to church and even much university discourse. Secondly, they turned a wide range of knowledge and matter into curiosities, into objects — whether material or discursive — whose role it was to satisfy people's curiosity. This cluster of institutions included some that fostered the practice of collecting in a literal or proper sense, that is, the collecting of material objects in cabinets of curiosities and the like. However, more broadly, these institutions tended also to shape knowledge as a metaphorical collection of curiosities. Books were presented as figurative cabinets of curiosities or as collections of recipes, facts, anecdotes, news, and so on. Even where no collecting metaphor was explicit, many books on history, antiquities, nature, occult sciences, travel, and so on were presented as containing discrete, ‘curious’ items. This culture of printed curiosities was especially prominent in the Germanic territories in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. These institutions' uses of curiosity often involved commodifying knowledge, marketing it, popularizing it, purveying it in convenient form for practical manipulation, promoting sociability within male networks of collectors or naturalists, and so on. Yet it is impossible to describe this culture of curiosities as a whole as being always positive about curiosity. However much it celebrated curiosity, even it was still haunted by old anxieties surrounding it.

This chapter discusses futurists interested in the occult sciences to illustrate the preoccupations of a spiritual, ontological order within the futurist thinking. The idea that futurist art does not intend to represent the exterior and sensory reality of the world—which the futurists believed had characterized the aesthetic of the impressionist painters—recurs in many of their theoretical writings. Futurism, the futurists claimed, instead sought to re-create in art the true essence of reality, as spiritualized by the subject observing it. If impressionism allowed itself to be enchanted by the illusoriness and sensuality of the surface, and cubism, prisoner of a coldly static aesthetic (and therefore from a Bergsonian point of view, evoking death images), was a “frozen fabrication of images,” then futurism, in exalting (psychic) energy, placed itself in opposition to both those currents as a movement of spiritual vitality and depth.

Chapter Three looks at the theosophical principle of duality of religion and science within the development of theosophical, New Thought, and Christian Science metaphysics. Temple ideas concerning the nature of God, humankind, redemption, the coming of the Avatar or Christos, and the Masters are explored in relationship to the Occult Science that informed the burgeoning interest in electricity that preoccupied the core membership as both metaphor for God and active principle in healing.

Chapter One outlines the organization of theosophical groups in the late 19^th century as they emerged in American religious life out of schisms within the Theosophical Society. Physician William Dower led the Syracuse branch of the society, and soon embarked on founding a new theosophical group called the Temple.

Chapter Eight explores the group’s most successful venture, the Halcyon Hotel and Sanatorium, opened with great publicity and the demonstration of the first X-ray machine in the vicinity in 1904. The chapter explores the variety of new healing methods employed at the sanatorium, and allied ventures such as the “Open Gate,” a tent-village for the treatment of tuberculosis. The use of electricity began with the Dower’s commitment to the Electronic Reactions of Abrams. The discussion is set in the context of the rise of biomedicine and medical law in California, at a time of the increasingly powerful American Medical Association’s crusade against quackery.

Chapter Two explores the establishment of the Temple movement with the dual leadership of Dower and Francia LaDue, who began to channel messages from the Masters of the Lodge many theosophists believed facilitated spiritual and material progress. The Temple established worship protocols and orders, based on masonic precedents, and developed new teachings and symbols to facilitate their call for universal kinship.

Chapter Ten witnesses the coming of the Avataric forces, the transition of the community from its charismatic phase to a more institutional one, and reveals the results of the stunning mix of the intuitive and the rational present in the community, through the rise of a brilliant generation of young people from the core members who became inventors and innovators in the field of applied physics, including inventing the first microwave amplifier called the Klystron.

Chapter Four studies the exoteric Temple organization known as the League of Brotherhoods, based on the group’s understanding of Hiawatha’s Iroquois League as an example of successful social organization based on spiritual kinship. They hoped the league would unify the various reform groups gaining strength before the election in 1900. That year the group announced the creation of a co-operative commonwealth to be located in the West.

This chapter provides a brief intellectual biography of Joseph de Maistre. Born in Chambéry in 1753, Maistre was educated like most upper-class, French-speaking Catholic boys of his time—by the clergy (likely the Jesuits), receiving a thorough grounding in the Greek and Latin classics. By fifteen he had already read Voltaire, and was harboring encyclopedic ambitions. At sixteen, Maistre enrolled in the law course at the University of Turin, where the works of Enlightenment philosophy were required reading, though his familiarity with them dated from earlier days. The major new intellectual influence Maistre came across during his prerevolutionary adulthood was illuminism. It offered Maistre a variety of intellectual attractions. The study of the occult sciences—astrology, alchemy, magic—seems to have been among them, and indeed his self-teaching of Greek and interest in ancient Platonism and Hermetism date from this period.

Provides an overview of the content. Opening with the emergence of Theosophy in American religious life, Radiance tells the story of a small but significant utopian moment, beginning with an interest in progressive politics based in an understanding of the Iroquois League, led to the creation of an agrarian and artistic utopia on the Central Coast of California called Halcyon. The opening of a nature-cure sanatorium and the interest in electricity and vibration there and in the teachings and music emanating from the group, provided a creative atmosphere that encouraged the youth of the community to experiment, leading to lasting discoveries and inventions in applied physics and music.

Chapter Seven studies theosophical architecture in the United States and the erection of the Blue Star Memorial Temple of Science, Philosophy, and Religion, dedicated to the memory of Francia LaDue in 1925. The group believed their edifice was a powerful architectural technology for centering unseen spiritual forces and important for the coming of the Christos or Avatar, said to occur in late 1928.

Chapter Nine addresses the Temple’s experiments in music, including theatrical mystery plays written by Irish literary figure John Varian, and new music invented by Henry Cowell that heralded a new worldwide movement in ultra-modern music. Varian attracted other well-known Irish writers, including Ella Young, who inspired the creation of the Dunites, a colony of artists and thinkers founded by Gavin Arthur, and published a short-lived but important magazine Dune Forum.

Chapter Five chronicles the group’s move to California and the grand plans they envisioned for a settlement, against the realities of growing a new colony, that began attracting attention as it defined itself as an agricultural and artisanal theosophical community with distinct familial, social and religious patterns.

Provides closing words. Opening with the emergence of Theosophy in American religious life, Radiance tells the story of a small but significant utopian moment, beginning with an interest in progressive politics based in an understanding of the Iroquois League, led to the creation of an agrarian and artistic utopia on the Central Coast of California called Halcyon. The opening of a nature-cure sanatorium and the interest in electricity and vibration there and in the teachings and music emanating from the group, provided a creative atmosphere that encouraged the youth of the community to experiment, leading to lasting discoveries and inventions in applied physics and music.

Chapter Six traces the growth and decline of the socialist experiments of the group’s Temple Home Association, a cooperative venture in property and mixed agriculture. Various departments of the association are outlined, including the Industrial School of Arts and Crafts. While various attempts were made to create a hybrid between Capitalism and Socialism, as the association failed in the local arena, the leadership turned to broader international agendas in their support of the League of Nations.