The Parliament of World Religions would be a major victory for the Theosophists, who worked closely with leading esoteric societies such as the Scottish Rite Freemasons, Swedenborgians, Mormons and Unitarians in establishing a convention at the end of the Chicago World Fair of 1893.
The Chair of both the Chicago Columbian Fair and the World Parliament of Religions was a Swedenborgian mystic named Charles Bonney (1831-1903), Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Illinois. The Swedenborgian dimension to this story is additionally useful to consider.
Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was the first modern guru of the west to coin the term ‘Theosophy’ and beginning in London in 1783, a network of Theosophy Society Lodges were set up to spread Swedenborg’s doctrine throughout the Anglo-American world.
Paralleling the later career of Madame Helena Blavatksy, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was born of an affluent aristocratic house, was advisor to several monarchs and created a vast cosmology of angelic beings, channelling of spirits, astral projections, Kaballism and held as his goal the unification of “spirit and science” in the form of a radical sensual perversion of spirituality.
As researcher Marsha Keith Schuchard demonstrates in her essay Jacobite and Visionary: the Masonic Journey of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic was also Rosicrucian Freemason, having been initiated into the London Grand Lodge in 1710.
Moving through corridors of power, Schuchard also demonstrates that Swedenborg acted as a spy, organized a branch of the Rosicrucian Invisible College in Sweden, applied the cypher and channelling techniques of English Rosicrucian spy John Dee (embedded in his allegorical channellings) and set the groundwork for an elaborate new system of Freemasonic initiation ceremonies through the Swedenborgian Rite.
Like the Gnostic Plymouth Brethren, and esoteric branches of Anglican political hierarchies around Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper (aka: Lord Shaftesbury), Swedenborg was obsessed with Armageddon, reconstituting the Jews back in Jerusalem and rebuilding Solomon’s Temple. (more...)
The World Parliament of Religions 1893: Womb of the New World Religion
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