Anna Kingsford

The teaching

Taught from The Perfect Way (1882), which she wrote with Edward Maitland, The Perfect Way in Diet and Clothed with the Sun.

The finding of Christ

The Perfect Way, whose second title is The Finding of Christ, teaches that the Christ is not only a man of history but a state every soul is called to reach. The name means the anointed: the soul anointed by the divine spirit and made one with God within. The story the Gospels tell, of a birth from a virgin, a temptation, a passion, a death, a rising and an ascension, is the story of that inward process told as history, and each person who walks the way lives the whole of it in their own soul.

The soul is the woman

In this teaching spirit is masculine and soul feminine, and God, who is both, is Father and Mother. The Virgin Mary stands for the soul: when the soul is pure, the divine is born in it, and that birth is the Christ. The woman clothed with the sun, in the Revelation, is the soul shining with the light of God, and her name was given to the book of Kingsford's illuminations. Kingsford saw her own age as the time when the woman within, the soul and its intuition, was to be raised to her place beside the intellect.

The four parts of a person

A person is fourfold: the material body; a fluid body within and around it, the astral body or perisoul; the soul, the individual self that passes from life to life; and the spirit, the divine life at the centre, God within the person. The body and the astral body belong to one life and are shed. The soul endures, and as it grows in purity it draws nearer to the spirit, until at last the two are one.

Intuition, the memory of the soul

Knowledge of divine things comes by intuition, and intuition, in The Perfect Way, is the soul's memory: what it learned in earlier lives and knows already, rising into the waking mind. The intellect is the man in the mind and the intuition the woman, and understanding needs both, the intuition to perceive and the intellect to test and set in order. Kingsford's own illuminations came this way, in sleep and in trance, and she held that a pure life, a pure diet and a quiet mind open the way to them.

Many lives, and the souls of animals

The soul is born many times and rises through many forms. It has passed through lower kingdoms before the human one, and the soul in an animal is on the same road upward. To torture an animal is therefore to wrong a soul, and Kingsford's war on vivisection rests on this as much as on pity: a science that tortures in order to know has, in her teaching, mistaken matter for the whole of things and lost the soul it set out to explain. Each life is shaped by the last, and what a soul does, it becomes.

The bloodless diet

The Perfect Way in Diet argues that a human being is made by nature to live on fruits, grains and the seeds of plants. The teeth and the organs of digestion, she reasons, are those of the fruit-eating apes and not of the beasts of prey; peoples who live on oats, rice or pulses are strong and long-lived; and land under crops feeds far more people than land under cattle. Flesh food, she holds, coarsens the body and the mind, and a bloodless diet makes for health, gentleness and clearness of inner sight. The house teaches it as her argument, and anyone changing their diet does so with a doctor's advice, the young, the pregnant and the unwell above all.

A Hermetic Christianity

Kingsford held that the West has its own mystic tradition and need not borrow the East's. The Hermetic books, the Greek mysteries and the Kabbalah teach under their own symbols what the Gospels teach under theirs, and the true Christianity is their crown: an esoteric faith, read in the spirit and not in the letter, whose sacraments are the inward acts of the soul. It was to study that tradition that she founded the Hermetic Society.