Date: Sun, 15 Sep 1996 09:18:34 -0500 (EST) From: David Parker Subject: Baum/theosophy To: DAVEH47@delphi.com Message-id: <47178.dparker@kscmail.kennesaw.edu> Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT X-Minuet-Version: Minuet1.0_Beta_17A X-POPMail-Charset: English NOT FOR FURTHER DISTRIBUTION Oz: L. Frank Baum's Theosophical Utopia by David B. Parker The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of America's favorite pieces of children's literature. Children like it because it's a good story, full of fun characters and exciting adventures. Adults--especially those in History or American Studies--like it because they can read between L. Frank Baum's lines and see all sorts of images of America at the turn of the century. In 1929, the literary scholar Edward Wagenknecht published the first serious study of L. Frank Baum's Oz stories. Wagenknecht described Oz as an "American utopia." "By this I do not mean that the Oz books are full of social criticism," he wrote. "Yet the utopia element in them is strong, and if the children do not forget it all by the time they grow up, perhaps it is not too fantastic to imagine that it may do some good."(1) Other scholars followed Wagenknecht's characterization of Oz. In an article titled "The Utopia of Oz," S. J. Sackett speculated that "children who read the Oz books would be influenced to be good children in the conventional sense of the word, with an especial disposition toward charitable or benevolent actions. But we can say also that they would have been influenced to believe in the freedom of the individual, in the voluntary acceptance of responsibility, in progressiveprison reform, in the proposition that money is relatively unimportant inlife, in the possibility of making a better world, in the pleasures of work, in the significance of contentment, in nonconformity, in the superiority of man to machine, in the need for permitting both sexes to share equally in the good life, in the folly of war, in reverance for life, in a truly substantial education, and in the need for the intellectand the emotions to be brought into harmony."(2) According to Russel B. Nye, "Oz is a family-style Utopia, phrased in terms amd placed in a framework the child can understand.... Oz is a fairlyland small-town or suburban home, tailored to the pattern of a little girl's dream.... The virtues of Oz are the homely American virtues of family love, friendliness for the stranger, sympathy for the underdog, practicality and common sense in facing life, reliance on one'sself for solutions to one's problems."(3) In "The Land of Oz and the American Dream," Barry Bauska wrote of Oz as "a land of genuine equality," "an idyllic place" with a "tremendous sense of community" where "virtue is rewarded, crises are overcome, good consistently prevails." "Not only pluck but goodness as well seems to lie in going on, in accepting what one comes up against, and perservering." Oz stories "assert that human decency and tolerance ought to be American realities, not merely mythic dreams or political platitudes."(4) Marius Bewley called Oz "America's Great Good Place,"(5)Raylyn Moore wrote of Baum and his works in a book titled Wonderful Wizard, Marvelous Land,(6) and so on. From the beginning, scholars have seen Oz as an American utopia. But what sort of utopia? What motivated it? Thirty years ago, Henry M. Littlefield published one of the most influential articles ever to appear in the pages of American Quarterly. Littlefield's "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism" described all sorts of hidden meanings and allusions to Gilded Age society in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: the wicked Witch of the East represented eastern industrialists and bankers who controlled the people (the Munchkins); the Scarecrow was the wise but naive western farmer; the Tin Woodman stood for the dehumanized industrial worker; the Cowardly Lion was William Jennings Bryan, Populist presidential candidate in 1896; the Yellow Brick Road, with all its dangers, was the gold standard; Dorothy's silver slippers (Judy Garland's were ruby red, but Baum originally made them silver) represented the Populists' solution to the nation's economic woes ("the free and unlimited coinage of silver"); Emerald City was Washington, D.C.; the Wizard, "a little bumbling old man, hiding behind a facade of paper mache and noise," was any of the Gilded Age presidents.(7) Scholars accepted Littlefield and began to teach it and to find additional correspondences between Populism and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Richard Jensen, in a study of Midwestern politics and culture, suggested that Dorothy's faithful dog represented the teetotaling Prohibitionists (an important part of the silverite coalition), and anyone familiar with the silverites' slogan "16 to 1"--that is, the ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one ounce of gold--would have instantly recognized "Oz" as the abbreviation for "ounce."(8) Brian Attebery wrote that "Dorothy, bold, resourceful, leading the men around her toward success, is a juvenile Mary Lease, the Kansas firebrand who told her neighbors to raise less corn and more hell."(9) Hugh Rockoff, in an article in the Journal of Political Economy, discovered a surprising number of new analogies. Once in the Emerald Palace, Dorothy had to pass through seven halls and climb three flights of stairs; seven and three make seventy-three, which stands for the Crime of '73, the congressional act that eliminated the coinage of silver and that proved to all Populists the collusion between congress and bankers. The Wicked Witch of the East was Grover Cleveland; of the West, William McKinley. And so on.(10) By the 1980s, Littlefield's interpretation had become the standard line on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.(11) I know I believed it. I hadn't read all the stuff mentioned above, but by the time I was in graduate school I knew that Baum's book was an allegory of Populism, that Oz was an agrarian utopia. I even proposed the Littlefield thesis as a lecture topic in an instructor's manual for a popular college-level textbook.(12) Then, about four years ago, I received from Wadsworth Publishing Company a copy of a new edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I did what we all do with such unsolicited books: I put it on the edge of my desk and forgot about it. Several weeks later, on my way out of the office to give a mid-term exam, I glanced around for something to take to read. My eye fell on this book. I had read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz several times as a kid, but that was years ago, and I was surprised at how much I had forgotten. For example, there is a chapter in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that, like many others in the book, did not make it into the 1939 MGM movie. In the movie, when the Wizard was unable to send Dorothy back to Kansas, the good witch Glinda suddenly appeared and told Dorothy the secret of the ruby slippers. In the book, however, Dorothy and her companions had to travel south, to the land of the Quadlings, to find Glinda. Along the way they came across "The Dainty China Country," a section of Oz that is protected by a high wall. The country's inhabitants are small people who, being made of china, are easily broken. "We must be very careful here," the Tin Woodman says, "or we may hurt these pretty little people so they will never get over it." Dorothy found a little china princess. "You are so beautiful," Dorothy said, "that I am sure I could love you dearly. Won't you let me carry you back to Kansas and stand you on Aunt Em's mantle-shelf?" "That would make me very unhappy," replied the princess. "You see, here in our own country we live contentedly, and can talk and move around as we please. But whenever any of us are taken away our joints at once stiffen, and we can only stand straight and look pretty. Of course that is all that is expected of us when we are on mantel-shelves and cabinets and drawing-room tables, but our lives are much pleasanter here in our own country." So Dorothy and the others crossed the china country very carefully until they reached the china wall on the other side. As they climbed the wall, the Lion's tail accidentally knocked over a china church, smashing it to pieces. "That was too bad," said Dorothy, "but really I think we were lucky in not doing these little people more harm.... They are all so brittle!" And so they left the dainty china country and proceeded on to find Glinda.(13) A china wall? Fragile china people who break when they encounter outsiders? The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1900, a very active time in American foreign affairs, and this chapter seems to reflect a certain anti-imperialism, specifically a fear of Western interference in China. I had re-read Littlefield's article not too long before this, and I didn't recall any mention of China or of foreign affairs in general; Littlefield had stuck to domestic issues. I remember being very excited as I collected those mid-terms. Here was something new. I'd write it up as a little article--the foreign policy aspects of The Wizard of Oz as a parable on Populism--and from now on, it would be the Littlefield/Parker thesis. I started to look into it, and I discovered two things. First, Littlefield was wrong. I began to suspect this early on, and before too long I had proved it, at least to my satisfaction. Second, I found that maybe there was something else to explain the dainty china country. I kept running into little hints of Baum's interest in the occult, spiritualism, and especially theosophy, a quasi-religious movement that was fairly popular in the late nineteenth century. Theosophy had arisen, in part, from an increased interest in spiritualism that began a few years earlier with the Fox sisters and others; in fact, Helena P. Blavatsky and Henry S. Olcott, who founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, first met in Vermont at the Eddy brothers' farmhouse, site of one of the most famous episodes of spirit materializations in the 1870s.(14) Another important factor was the growing concern over reconciling religion and science, especially Darwinian thought. Since America was experiencing a new awareness of Oriental religions, as well as what Paul A. Carter called "The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age," a crisis that witnessed a decline in traditional Protestantism and a growing secularization,(15) something like theosophy was probably inevitable. The basic tenets of theosophical thought are relatively simple. The world's religions have all derived, corrupted, from a single source, an ancient universal religion based on what Blavatsky called the "secret doctrine" or the "ancient wisdom." This wisdom contained the foundation of all knowledge; it was the "alpha and omega of universal science," Blavatsky wrote. Fortunately, I don't have the time to describe what might be called theosophical science in any great detail; suffice it to say that it included notions of cosmic unity, planetary chains, human evolution within seven planes of existence, reincarnation, and so on. The ancient wisdom, long lost to most men, has been kept alive by masters ("Adepts") who have reached the highest stage of human development and who from time to time pass bits of their wisdom to mankind. (This sounds a lot like New Age channelling, which suggests that the New Age is not so new after all.) The stated objectives of the Theosophical Society were: "to form a nucleus of the Universal Brotherhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color; to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science; and to investigate the unexplained laws of Nature and the powers latent in man."(16) With its occult tendencies and its general philosophy, theosophy was quite similarto esoteric Buddhism; in fact, the two terms were often used interchangably, even by adherents.(17) Given its closeness to Asian religion, theosophy might help explain Baum's dainty china country. Here was something worth pursuing. I knew that Baum had been editor of a newspaper, the Aberdeen (S.D.) Saturday Pioneer, in 1890-91. With the assistance of Nancy Koupal, Publications Director of the South Dakota State Historical Society and author of a forthcoming book on Baum's newspaper days, I managed to get hold of a microfilm copy of the paper and began reading. I discovered rather quickly that the Pioneer was a Republican paper. During the municipal elections in the Spring of 1890, Baum editorialized in support of the Republican candidates; after they won, he wrote that "Aberdeen has redeemed herself ... [a]fter suffering for nearly a year from the incompetence of a democratic administration." Baum later urged unity against the growing Independent movement: "We are all members of one great family, the family which saved the Union, the family which stands together as the emblem of prosperity among the nations--Republicanism!" Not only did Baum speak for the Republican party; he spoke against the movement that would soon evolve into the Populists.(18) This pretty much clinched it for me: Baum was a Republican newspaper editor in 1890, and it was therefore unlikely that a decade later he would write a sympathetic allegory of Populism.(19) Maybe there wasn't much in Baum's Aberdeen newspaper to support a Populist interpretation, but there was a lot on issues like women's suffrage, toleration, alternative religions, occultism, and especially theosophy. In his very first issue, Baum wrote a long editorial on the state of religion in America. He concluded with the following: Amongst the various sects so numerous in America today who find their fundamental basis in occultism, the Theosophists stand pre-eminent both in intelligence and point of numbers. ... Theosophy is not a religion. Its followers are simply 'searchers after Truth.' Not for the ignorant are the tenets they hold, neither for the worldly in any sense. Enrolled within their ranks are some of the grandest intellects of the Eastern and Western worlds.... As interpreted by themselves they accept the teachings of Christ, Budda and Mohammed, acknowledging them Masters or Mahetmahs, true prophets each in his generation, and well-versed in the secrets of Nature. But the truth so earnestly sought is not yet found in its entirety, or if it be, is known only to the privileged few. The Theosophists, in fact, are the dissatisfied of the world, the dissenters from all creeds. They owe their origins to the wise men of India, and are numerous, not only in the far famed mystic East, but in England, France, Germany and Russia. They admit the existence of a God-- not necessarily a personal God. To them God is Nature and Nature God. We have mentioned their high morality; they are also quiet and unobtrusive, seeking no notoriety, yet daily growing so numerous that even in America they may be counted by thousands. But, despite this, if Christianity is Truth, as our education has taught us to believe, there can be no menace to it in Theosophy.(20) A year later, shortly before he published his last issue of the Pioneer and moved to Chicago, Baum reprinted a letter from "X.Y.Z." on "the recent strife between Christians and Spiritualists in our city" (a conflict, incidentally, in which Baum had apparently played a large role): "Your paper is accounted a liberal one, and I believe you yourself are accused of studying the Vedas and being more than half Buddhist." Baum responded: "We have been accused of so many things that it may be as well to state that we contribute regularly toward the support of the church, and claim religious freedom in everything else."(21) Needless to say, I found this all very interesting. I wrote to Nancy Koupal and mentioned my idea for a possible link between theosophy and Baum's Oz stories. Nancy was still promoting a Populist connection, but she is a kind soul and asked if I had seen John Algeo's work on Baum and theosophy. No, I replied (somewhat crestfallen--don't you hate it when you get a great idea, only to find that someone else has beaten you to it?). I asked for a citation, and Nancy quickly responded that the article was in American Theosophist (the journal of the Theosophical Society in America--no wonder I hadn't come across it!). Algeo's brief article, titled "A Notable Theosophist: L. Frank Baum," announced that on September 4, 1892, Baum and his wife were admitted into the membership of the Chicago branch of the Theosophical Society.(22) John Algeo, prominent linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Georgia, is now president of the Theosophical Society in America. He told me last year that when he "first concocted the Theosophical interpretation..., it was in response to a challenge to find a Theosophical reading of the story of Oz, and I intended it as a joke." But he became intrigued by the possibility and began investigating further, establishing for the first time Baum's formal connection with the society.(23) So there it was: L. Frank Baum was a card-carrying theosophist. Although Algeo was not the first to mention Baum's interest in theosophy, (24) no one before him had attempted to show a connection between Baum's theosophical beliefs and his writings. I first came across the notion in William R. Leach's foreword and afterword to the new edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that I read as I gave that mid-term a few years ago. Leach suggested that theosophy was "important as a shaping force" in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, but he emphasized its psychological aspects. Borrowing William James's phrase "mind cure" (from the chapter on "The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness" in The Varieties of Religious Experience), Leach described theosophy as a philosophy that rejected self-denial and anxiety and instead embraced prosperity and what Norman Vincent Peale would later call "The Power of Positive Thinking." The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, according to Leach, "met ... the particular ethical and emotional needs of people living in a new urban, industrial society. The Wizard of Oz was an optimistic secular theraputic text: it helped make people feel at home in America's new industrial economy, and it helped them appreciate and enjoy, without guilt, the new consumer abundance and way of living produced by that economy."(25) But Baum's belief in theosophy could have several other implications for his writings. For example, many early theosophists were feminists, and theosophy stressed a basic equality of the sexes. Most of the major characters in the Oz series were female: Dorothy, the girl whose accidental journey started it all; Glinda, the Good Witch who helped Dorothy return home and appeared as a wise sorceress in the later books; Ozma, who became the wise and kind ruler of Oz in the second book; and so on. One can see a similar possible theosophical reflection in Baum's anti-intellectualism. In The Voice of the Silence, one of her most popular theosophical works, Blavatsky commented on the distinction between "Head-learning" and "Soul Wisdom." Both were important, but "even ignorance is better that Head-learning" alone.(26) Perhaps this is reflected in H.M. Wogglebug, T.E., a character that appeared in The Marvelous Land of Oz (the first sequel). The wogglebug was a funny-looking insect who sat in Professor Nowitall's lecture class until it had absorbed all the knowledge the teacher had to offer (hence his degree, T.E.: Thoroughly Educated). Or a more familiar example: the Scarecrow, who mistakingly thinks he needs brains ("Head-learning"); actually he gets by very well without brains, and is in fact the "smartest" of the travellers on the yellow brick road. The theosophical belief in reincarnation can be seen in how Baum's characters sometimes change identities. The best example: Tip, the young boy who is the main character in The Marvelous Land of Oz. At the end of the book, Tip is transformed into Ozma, the ruler of Oz. (Incidentally, "Ozma" is similar to "Atma," the theosophists' name for the Spirit, the highest level of man's evolution. Baum's love of puns, theosophical or otherwise, is evident throughout the Oz books.) Colors were important to early theosophists. Charles W. Leadbetter, among the handful of important shapers of theosophical thought, came up with a list of colors and their correspondences with the astral body. Yellow meant "intellect," for example, while emerald green denoted "versatility, ingenuity and resourcefulness, applied unselfishly."(27) So Dorothy, on her quest, follows the yellow brick road (intellect) and discovers, at the end, simply a humbug (the Wizard)--"Head-learning" alone is useless. Only after Dorothy applies the lessons of the Emerald City--"versatility, ingenuity and resourcefulness, applied unselfishly"--does Glinda tell her that Dorothy herself always had the power to return home. It is interesting and perhaps significant that the color scheme reinforces other aspects of a possible theosophical interpretation--especially what John Algeo identified as the great theosophical moral or lesson of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: "We must rely on ourselves, for we alone have the power to save ourselves.... We each have everything we need; we lack only the intuition of Glinda the Good to tell us so." Or as Blavatsky said in The Voice of the Silence, "Prepare thyself, for thou wilt have to travel on alone. The Teacher can but point the way."(28) Theosophy could also explain the dainty china country, the chapter in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that started all this for me. Theosophy's ideas of brotherhood and equality promoted toleration in general, and especially of all things Oriental. In fact, given the enthusiasm with which theosophists embraced the ancient cultures of the Orient--they tended to see the Hinduism and Buddhism as closest to the masters' ancient wisdom--theosophists were open to the charge of pushing toleration to the point of Oriental favoritism. Theosophists were likelyto be more sympathetic than most Americans to Oriental culture amd religion, and therefore to oppose, or at least question, outside interference in China. Related to this is the theosophists' opposition to most organized religion, and especially to Christianity. While none of the Oz books contains explicit references to Christianity, it is noteworthy that the only church mentioned in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the one that the Cowardly Lion smashed to pieces. Perhaps it symbolized American Christian missionary activity in China. Theosophy could motivate people in different, even contradictory, ways. James Cousins, the Irish poet and playwright and a noted theosophist, wrote a small volume, War: A Theosophical View, in 1914, just as the horror that would become World War I was getting underway. Cousins argued that struggle was a natural manifestation of the interplay of the energy and matter that made up the Theosophists' Absolute Unity. Furthermore, death in war simply moves soldiers, more quickly than usual, from one existence (and perhaps level of evolutionary development) to another. But where theosophy motivated Cousins to accept war as necessary, even desirable, it moved Baum in the opposite direction. In The Emerald City of Oz (1910), Oz comes under attack from an evil outside threat. Ozma, the wise ruler of Oz after the Wizard's departure, says: "I do not wish to fight.... No one has the right to destroy any living creatures, however evil they may be, or to hurt them or make them unhappy. I will not fight, even to save my kingdom.... Because the Nome King intends to do evil is no excuse for my doing the same." Perhaps a better example is Baum's last book, Glinda of Oz, which he started writing early in 1915. With its references to submarines and powerful weapons, the book was obviously "about" World War I. Baum described the efforts of Glinda and Ozma, assisted by three "Adepts," to forestall a foolish war between two vain and foolish rulers. The story, with its message of pacifism, provides an interesting theosophical contrast to Cousins. One other point might be made very quickly. Scholars have suggested that early adherents of theosophy and esoteric Buddhism tended to be socially or economically marginal.(29) Before his success with the Oz stories, Baum was a spectacular failure as an actor, a businessman, a newspaper editor, a travelling salesman--in other words, he fit the theosophical mold perfectly. This papers suggests a relationship between certain themes, episodes, and characters in the Oz stories and L. Frank Baum's theosophical beliefs. The relationship is no doubt more complicated that the simple account given here, but it is a relationship that I believe is worthy of further study. Henry Clarke Warren, a late-nineteenth-century American scholar of Buddhism, wrote: "A large part of the pleasure that I have experienced in the study of Buddhism has arisen from the strangeness of what I may call the intellectual landscape. All the ideas, the modes of argument, even the postulates assumed and not argued about, have always seemed so strange, so different from anything to which I have been accustomed, thatI feel all the time as though walking in a fairyland."(30) Baum's experience with theosophy/Buddhism left him feeling as if he too were walking through a fairyland, a fairyland he described in his theosophical utopia of Oz. NOTES 1. Edward Wagenknecht, Utopia Americana (Seattle: University of Washington Book Store, 1929), reprinted in L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz, Critical Heritage Series, ed. by Michael Patrick Hearn (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 142-57, quotation on 152. 2. S. J. Sackett, "The Utopia of Oz," Georgia Review 14 (1960): 275-90, reprinted in Baum, The Wizard of Oz, Critical Heritage Series, 220 (quotation). 3. Russel B. Nye, "An Appreciation," in Martin Gardner and Russel B. Nye, The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957), 12, 16. 4. Barry Barry, "The Land of Oz and the American Dream," Markham Review 5 (Winter 1976): 22-24. 5. Marius Bewley, "The Land of Oz: America's Great Good Place," in Masks & Mirrors: Essays in Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 255-67. 6. Raylyn Moore, Wonderful Wizard, Marvelous Land (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1974). 7. Henry M. Littlefield, "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism," American Quarterly 16 (1964): 47-58 (quotation on 54). 8. Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 282-83. 9. Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: >From Irving to Le Guin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 86-87. 10. Hugh Rockoff, "The 'Wizard of Oz' as a Monetary Allegory," Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990): 739, 751. 11. There have been other interpretations of the book--scholars have read it from psychoanalytical, feminist, theological/philosophical, mythological, and Marxist perspectives, among others--but Littlefield's was easily the best known and most widely accepted of the bunch. 12. Thomas S. Morgan and David B. Parker, Instructor's Manual and Test Bank to Accompany America: A Narrative History, Second Edition, by George B. Tindall (New York: Norton, 1988), 213. For some reason, I did not put this suggestion in the Instructor's Manual for the first edition of the textbook, published four years earlier. 13. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, foreword and afterword by William R. Leach (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1991), 140-44. 14. For an interesting account of the early years of theosophy in the United States, see Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky's Baloon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America (New York: Schocken, 1995). 15. Paul A. Carter, The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971). 16. Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived: A History of the Theosophical Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 78. 17. Thomas A. Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844-1912: Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 50-51. 18. Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 12 April 1890, 19 April 1890, 18 Oct. 1890. For more on Baum's editorship, see two articles by Nancy Tystad Koupal: "From the Land of Oz: L. Frank Baum's Satirical View of South Dakota's First Year of Statehood," Montana: The Magazine of Western History 40 (1990):47-57; and "The Wonderful Wizard of the West: L. Frank Baum in South Dakota, 1888-91," Great Plains Quarterly 9 (1989): 203-15. These two articles convinced me of the importance of the Pioneer in understanding Baum. 19. I explored this more fully in "The Rise and Fall of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a 'Parable on Populism,'" Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians 15 (1994): 49-63. 20. Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 25 Jan. 1890. 21. Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, 1 Jan. 1891. 22. Nancy Koupal, personal correspondence, 19 Apr. 1993 and 7 July 1993; John Algeo, "A Notable Theosophist: L. Frank Baum," American Theosophist 74 (1986): 270-73. 23. John Algeo, personal correspondence, 21 Dec. 1995. 24. See, for example, Michael Patrick Hearn's biographical sketch in The Annotated Wizard of Oz (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973), 72-73. 25. William R. Leach, "Trickster's Tale," 170, and "The Clown from Syracuse: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum," 2, in L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1991). 26. Helena Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence (1889), quoted in Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revealed, 48. 27. Leadbetter's work was synthesized in Arthur E. Powell, The Astral Body and Other Astral Phenomena (1927; rpt., Wheaton, Ill.: Theosophical Publishing House, 1978), 12. 28. John Algeo, "The Wizard of Oz: The Perilous Journey," American Theosophist 74 (1986): 291-97. 29. Tweed, American Encounter with Buddhism, 53-55; Robert S. Ellwood, Jr., Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 118. 30. Quoted in Tweed, American Encounter with Buddhism, 96. Copyright [c] 1996 by David B. Parker David B. Parker dparker@kscmail.kennesaw.edu Asst. Professor of History Kennesaw State University (770) 423-6713 (office) 1000 Chastain Rd 423-6294 (department) Kennesaw, GA 30144-5591 (770) 423-6432 (fax)