Читать книгу Martyrs and Mystics - Ed Glinert - Страница 10

JAMES PIERREPONT GREAVESS ADDRESS, 49 Burton Street

Greaves was an early nineteenth-century educationalist and theologian who promoted piety among his followers while urging them to embrace the latest fashionable dietary and sexual fads such as vegetarianism, water-drinking and celibacy. Greaves was later described by G. J. Holyoake, pioneer of the co-operative movement, as ‘the most accomplished, pleasant and inscrutable mystic this country has produced’. In the 1830s he opened a school on Ham Common near Richmond, Surrey, based on the healthy notion that ‘Pure air, simple food, exercise and cold water are more beneficial to man than any churches, chapels, or cathedrals.’ Thomas Carlyle, the great essayist and historian, was not convinced and denounced Greaves as a ‘humbug . . . few greater blockheads broke the world’s breads in my day’.

TEMPLE OF THE OCCULT, 99 Gower Street

Frank Dutton Jackson, a fake cleric, and his wife, Editha, set up a Temple of the Occult in the heart of Georgian Bloomsbury in the early years of the twentieth century. Here Jackson, describing himself as Theo Horos, debauched hundreds of young girls in mock religious ceremonies conducted under low lights in a haze of incense smoke. He told one girl, Daisy Adams, he was Jesus Christ and that she would give birth to a divine child. He and Editha, who claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of Ludwig I of Bavaria, were eventually prosecuted. They were tried at the Old Bailey where Jackson pleaded: ‘Did Solomon not have 300 legal wives and 600 others?’ He was nevertheless convicted of raping and procuring girls for immoral purposes.

The Spectator magazine occupied the building from the 1920s to 1975, and it now belongs to the Catholic chaplaincy.

→ The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, p. 71

UNIVERSITY CHURCH OF CHRIST THE KING, Byng Place

This superb Gothic revival church was built in 1851–4 in the medieval Early English architectural style for the Catholic Apostolic sect. Its first preacher, Edward Irving, was expelled from a nearby Presbyterian church for encouraging the congregation to ‘speak in tongues’ – talk spontaneously in ancient biblical languages. In the church basement is a room filled with ceremonial cloaks, including one reserved for the return of Jesus Christ.