26 - Global Seekers in The Quest: A Case Study of an Occult Periodical’s Worldly Religion

Summary

SOMETIME BETWEEN 1909 AND 1930, if you were living within reach of the British postal service and were curious about religion in a serious but not orthodox way, you might find yourself perusing a copy of The Quest: A Quarterly Review, a relatively inexpensive yet substantial periodical edited by the gentleman scholar of Gnosticism G. R. S. Mead (1866–1933). While the Quest Society disavowed any specific religious affiliation, it was shaped by late Victorian occultism, and especially Theosophy and its corporate body the Theosophical Society, of which Mead had been a high-ranking member. Theosophy was the most prominent among a wide array of late Victorian occult religious movements. The Theosophical Society, founded in New York by the Russian emigre Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the American Henry Steele Olcott, claimed to unite all religious traditions, and, moreover, religion, philosophy and science more broadly, in one perennial, universal wisdom tradition. In a sense the Quest Society out-Theosophied Theosophy: by disavowing a specific occult affiliation, it could be even more open, heterodox and syncretic than Theosophy itself. At the same time, it pursued a recognisably Theosophical or more broadly occult project of investigating the ‘truth’ about religion – in the sense of insights about the ‘scholarly study of religion’ as well as ‘spiritual wisdom’. Among other similar (more and less occult) periodicals of the period, such as The New Age and The Dial, The Quest stands apart for its particularly deep and extensive engagement with so-called Eastern religions and its publication of writing by a wide range of scholars, especially scholars of religion.

If you found yourself among the ‘more general public seriously interested’ in its spiritual project whom the journal’s mission statement addressed, you might fill out the subscription card (Figure 26.1) tucked into your issue, or, if you were near London, attend one of the meetings of the Quest Society, during which scholars, artists, writers and clergy gave lectures, many of which were subsequently printed as articles in the society’s journal (Figure 26.2).