De Zirkoff on the Countess of Caithness

Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 9 pages

Nine pages, de Zirkoff's note on the Countess of Caithness from the biographical notes to volume VII of the Collected Writings, pages 361 to 363. The frontispiece is by Ilene Meyer. *She is the most highly placed of the people in this batch*, and the account is largely a matter of titles, marriages and money — which is itself part of the movement's history, since her houses were where a good deal of it happened.

Marie Sinclair, Countess of Caithness and Duchesse de Pomar, was a lifelong friend of both Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott. She was the only daughter of Don Antonio José de Mariategui of Santa Catalina, Macuriges, and was born at Madrid in 1830. In 1853 she married her first husband, General the Count de Medina Pomar, who died in 1868; their son, Manuel Maria de Medina Pomar y Mariategui, was created Duke of Pomar by Pope Pius IX on coming of age in 1875, the title being recognised and confirmed to him and his heirs by King Alfonso XII of Spain on his accession. In 1872 she married, as his second wife, Lord Barrogill, head of the Sinclair clan and fourteenth Earl of Caithness, born in 1821 and died at New York in 1881 — a man well known for his mechanical inventions. In 1879 Pope Leo XIII extended to her by letters patent the title her son held. Her importance to the movement lay in what she did with that position: she was among its most prominent early patrons in France, and the Paris circles that appear elsewhere in this section were largely gathered around her.

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